 Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polygon. Welcome to Nassau, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader of live tech coverage. And we're here at Polygon 18, beautiful Bahama, Bahamas, Nassau. Brian Brackin is here, the CEO of Kairos. Brian, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. We just met this morning. I heard you up on a panel. So, Kairos, first of all, I love the name. Thank you. Thank you. Where's the name come from? It's Greek. I thought so, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it means the most opportune moment. Oh, I love it. Okay, so you seize the opportune moment to do facial recognition. Everybody knows facial recognition from Facebook, but talk about what you guys bring to the table. Yeah, and like you said, you've seen it for Facebook, the new Apple iPhone has facial recognition. It's really all about identifying who someone is and verifying their identity. We use it for companies. Prior to doing this whole ICL stuff, we were an existing business, six years old, mostly Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies. We help retailers understand who's in the retail store, their age, gender, ethnicity, emotions they're feeling. We also help people like, even like school bus companies to identify which kids are getting on the right bus. We help movie studios understand how you feel about a film. So we've been in this business for some time. We think it's perfect for the blockchain. So there's a real security angle there as well. Absolutely. As the fun on Facebook, what's the state of facial recognition technology? I'd love to hear from an expert. I've talked to some people say, oh, it's nowhere near ready. I'm like, how can it not be ready? I go on Facebook, they tag me in an instant. I go, no, don't tag me. Where are we in terms of the quality and the efficacy of facial recognition? Yeah, we can find one person in a billion in about one third of a second. And we're about 99.8, 99.9% sure they are who we think that they are. So it's definitely, the future is really now. Now you guys, unlike many companies who have either done an ICO or raising security tokens or have done utility tokens, you guys are an established company. And then decided, so before we get into that, give us the history of the company. Seize the moment and how you got started and how you got here. Sure, so my personal background, I'm going to fill it out for you originally. We were just talking about being an English man. Congratulations. Thank you. Long time coming. Well deserved win, it hurts me from being from Boston. But we still get along. Yeah, we get along. So I worked at large corporations most of my career, Comcast, IBM and Philly, took a job at Apple just after the iPhone launch and all the way through the iPad launch where Steve Jobs was still there. There's a period of exponential growth, changed my life. And then I got the startup bug and quit my job there, which my parents thought I was absolutely crazy and started Cairo's first in San Francisco and they moved the company to Miami. We realized early on that facial recognition was the right direction. That helping companies to do it was a big idea. And essentially the market is anywhere or anyone that works with people. So I thought it was a good and growing market. And we got into it deeply in the last three to three to four years or so. So actually a bit of a tangent, but I want to ask you GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation is coming. It's here, but the fines and penalties going to effective May of this year. I learned recently that pictures qualify for personally identifiable information. Correct. Has that been a tailwind for you? If people come to you and say, hey, we need help because we're in the video business or whatever it is. If we need help in case somebody needs to identify somebody, is that a use case? Yeah, we think a lot about GDPR, a lot about it. You know, as your viewers may know, that's really a European Union regulation. However, it kind of extends to people who are anybody doing business there, which is everyone in the US, right? So it becomes almost like de facto US law, even though it's not a US law. There's a lot of concerns about because of facial recognition, your picture really becomes your identity. So how do we manage that? We're actually one of the first anonymous facial recognition companies in the world. We sometimes just need to know that it's the same person, but not who that person is protecting your anonymity or your individuality. Okay, is that where blockchain comes in? Exactly, correct. So let's pivot to that discussion in blockchain. Talk about the technology that allows me to own my own data, protect my own data, anonymize. How's that work? Absolutely, so let's say me and you we're in a kind of friendly wager, if this were legal, right, on the tourable, right? And you lost the game, so now you owe me 20 ether. But you don't just want to send it to a random address, you want to make sure that it's really me, because 20 ether is a decent amount of money these days, right? And so now you're going to use facial recognition, the transaction, say only this face can unlock this transaction, can open this ether and deposit it into their wallet. I don't need to know who I am, but just this face. And so I can do the same thing on the other side. I can say I will only accept ether from this space. So yeah, it just changes everything. And then the obvious question people are going to ask, you sort of addressed it early, but how secure is that? How hackable is that? Can I take a picture of that somebody and then recreate that image? How do you, you know, thwart that? Yeah, yeah, there's a number of ways. So some things like you can take a picture of someone else and say, hold it in front of the camera, that kind of thing. So we have all kinds of anti-fraud detection. So we can detect from the inference of light, because we can read emotions, is the person kind of really alive? Are they feeling any emotions or are they reading? There's all kinds of technologies we can use to verify someone's identity. All right, let's get into the business of tokens. You chose to tokenize your business. Why does it make sense to tokenize your business? Yeah, and you know, you see in this world, oftentimes we'll write a white paper and say this is my idea, but I appreciate that. They were raising tens of millions of dollars sometimes and never coming through on that idea, right? In our case, we were an existing business. We had already raised about $8 million in capital. You know, it was like a series A, series B, very traditional way. And we didn't think we could just go off and build a new division in Gibraltar or do something kind of exotic. Not when we're US-based and we have US-based investors and venture capital investors. So we said, let's do this the right way. Let's create a security token. It's completely SEC compliant. Let's just do this like another round, simply tokenize the existing investors and the new investors. So they were all in the same boat. And we think we've seen kind of great success. Okay, and so the motivation for them was, for investors was equity. Motivation for the existing preferred investors was liquidity. Okay, so you basically took those existing preferred, they protected their ownership and they transferred them to token. Transfer them over to token, yeah. So essentially you don't lose any equity, right? But you gain liquidity. You're still in the business. If you're long on Kairos, you can stay long on Kairos. If you want to take a little bit off the table, you can take a little bit off the table. It really changes or they stay trying this. And you're doing a utility token as well or no? You're doing a utility token as well. And with the utility token, we gave it away for free because they went to the SEC or anyone else. Look, we're not trying to profit or get investment from the utility token. That's why it's completely free. We're doing an SEC compliant security token. And talk about the use cases for that utility token. How are people utilizing it and where's the value? Going back to our friendly bet for the 25 ether. When I create my face the first time when I do the scan, that costs one Kairos token. Now after that to verify it is free. But to create the face the first time with the Kairos token. I see, okay. And then you guys charge a monthly subscription for your service, correct? For the blockchain service, no. We're just face scans. Yeah, right, okay. But for your core business. For core business, monthly subscription, reoccurring revenue, absolutely. Excellent. All right. I'll give you the last word. Kind of the future of where this all going. We're here at this investors conference. It's the first conference focused on security tokens. Yes. So you're a great example of an existing company, not a blank piece of paper. What's your outlook for the future of this industry, this ecosystem, this community? I am literally bubbling with excitement on the future. And it is, as you know, it's really tough for founders who are not based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley to raise capital. It's going to democratize that entire process. Now what you'll have is a company started in Miami or Portland or Boston, right? And first they will do a round of small investors. It's local VCs, get their model together, get their act right, get some customers. Things start to work for the company. And then they're, instead of trying to go to Silicon Valley and beg them to invest, and maybe they won't just because of the location. Now you'll do an ICO at that stage and make the folks in your community richer. They go out and do more things, make better cities. It's really, really exciting. Great. Brian Breckin, thanks very much for coming. Thanks so much. I really appreciate having you. Yep. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE.