Ural developer of goods protection against counterfeiting attracts $1M

Ural developer of a system for goods protection against counterfeiting, which has no analogues in the world, attracts $1M from Veles Capital investment company. The support will be received by project QRGL (QR-Codes + GeoLocation) of Design bureau North which is a resident of Skolkovo. In return for the investment the new shareholder received about two thirds of the project. The funds will be used to complete the development and make a product of full value, as well as its output on the world market.

According to the initiator of the QRGL project Pavel Medvedev, the project team was originally intended not just to profit from their work, which inevitably leads to failure, but to change the world for the better, since the new technology, even being commercial, will help to solve the existing problem of counterfeit products.

Medvedev also said that he was very pleased to see a big Moscow Fund among the partners since its competence and connections may be even more necessary for the project than just an investment. The total investment of IC Veles Capital will be about $1M.

The essence of QRGL project is based on the idea to protect products from counterfeiting by attaching a label to each unit of products in the form of a special QR-code that contains a link to the server of a verification center and a unique multivalued number that is pre-registered in the database. The verification server records the history of queries for each multivalued number. For information about the authenticity of goods, the QR-code is read by specialized smartphone software, and at the same time sends a request containing IMEI number of the smartphone and the coordinates of the place the test was performed at in addition to the unique multivalued number. The decision on whether the product if original or fake is based on the analysis of inquiries’ history of a particular number - when, how, with what phone and what locations the previous inspections were made from. The prototype of the project was introduced in the spring of 2010. There were a lot of skeptics who thought the project was impossible.

The project has opened its office and recruits staff in Yekaterinburg.