ELEMENTS

Founded in December 2013 as Liquid, Inc. and later renamed ELEMENTS, Inc. in 2020, the company is a publicly-traded entity based in Tokyo, Japan, that specializes in personal authentication and optimization solutions. The firm was established by Yasuhiro Hisada, who, inspired by his interest in mathematics and a university lecture on economic crime, sought to create a world where identity could be proven by an individual's intrinsic characteristics. Hisada, who graduated from Keio University's Faculty of Law and worked in IPO consulting for IT ventures at Daiwa Securities SMBC, was motivated by the idea that financial crimes occur because money isn't intrinsically tied to its owner. This led him and three other members to start developing technology focused on human data, specifically biometric authentication, starting with fingerprint recognition.

ELEMENTS operates on a BaaS (Backend as a Service) model, providing its data-driven solutions to service providers across a multitude of industries. The company's business is structured around two core pillars: personal authentication solutions and personal optimization solutions. The former includes their flagship product, "LIQUID eKYC," an online identity verification service that has achieved a dominant market share in Japan and has processed over 50 million verifications. Other authentication products include "LIQUID Auth" for ongoing user verification and "LIQUID Shield," a service designed to detect cross-industry fraudulent activities. The company also offers digital identity wallets, PASS and GPASS, with the latter designed for foreign nationals.

The personal optimization solutions segment leverages the company's image analysis and machine learning capabilities to cater to the "clothing, food, and housing" sectors. This includes services like "my IDEAL," a size-matching service for semi-custom shoes, and "SugeKae," an image generation AI tool for the apparel industry. For housing and urban environments, ELEMENTS has developed "MyPlace for Home," a smart home platform, and an office diagnostic report service for workspace renovation and relocation. The company also operates a high-performance GPU cloud service, "ELEMENTS CLOUD," to support AI development. The company's journey began with a focus on fingerprint biometrics and saw its first major project in 2015 with a biometric payment system trial at a theme park. After establishing its subsidiary Liquid, Inc. (formerly PASS, Inc.) in 2018, the company launched its pivotal LIQUID eKYC service in 2019. It successfully went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market in December 2022.

Keywords: personal authentication, biometric security, eKYC, identity verification, image recognition, machine learning, AI solutions, BaaS, digital identity, fraud detection, personal optimization, size matching, smart home platform, GPU cloud services, image generation AI, Yasuhiro Hisada, Liquid Inc, Tokyo Stock Exchange, apparel tech, fintech security