Indivos Corporation

Company overview. Indivos Corporation was a U.S. biometric-payments company based in Oakland, California. Founded in 1995 by four engineers and a patent attorney, it was originally named VeriStar Corporation before renaming as Indivos. It was privately held and venture-backed (press reports indicate roughly $20–35 million raised across Indivos and its acquirer by 2003). Through a merger with San Francisco–based Solidus Networks, Inc. (which operated under the "Pay By Touch" brand), Indivos became a wholly owned subsidiary of Solidus. No reliable public figure for Indivos's standalone headcount or revenue is available; it is no longer an independent operating business.

Products / operations. Indivos developed tokenless, finger-scan authentication for point-of-sale and other financial transactions. Its Pay By Touch system enrolled a consumer's fingerprint and linked it to credit card, debit, and checking accounts, allowing payment without cards, cash, or checks. The company operated the identification database and charged merchants per transaction, partnering with sensor maker DigitalPersona and running pilots with West Seattle Thriftway, a McDonald's in Fresno, and a Visa cafeteria. The business rested on a patent portfolio of roughly 23 issued and 13 pending U.S. patents covering tokenless biometric financial transactions (Digital Transactions; American Banker).

Litigation posture. Indivos was an operating company, not a non-practicing entity, and an active two-way litigant — consistent with one plaintiff and one defendant case in the tracked data. Both are 2005 suits against rival BioPay, LLC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware: BioPay's Jan. 18, 2005 declaratory-judgment action naming Solidus Networks and Indivos, and Solidus/Indivos's Feb. 15, 2005 patent-infringement countersuit. These are competitive, portfolio-versus-portfolio assertions between market participants rather than NPE campaign litigation; the venue was Delaware, not a plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas docket.

Notable context. The BioPay dispute ended when Pay By Touch acquired BioPay for $82 million in stock and cash in December 2005, absorbing its patent portfolio. Earlier, Indivos prevailed in an N.D. Cal. ownership challenge to 15 of its patents brought by Excel Innovations/Hoffman (2004). Indivos was later included among the subsidiaries in Solidus Networks' 2007 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings.