Japanese multi-national corporation Sony through its corporate venture fund, Sony Innovation Fund, has made a strategic investment in the payment security company MagicCube, the creator of the world’s only Software Trusted Execution Environment platform. The 48 billion dollar-per-year legacy payment terminal market is MagicCube’s first targeted addressable market.
Its disruptive technology now enables merchants and banks to forgo buying and subsidizing expensive, single-function card-acceptance devices. In their place through the platform are apps secured by MagicCube for payments accepted at the point of sale. Moving forward MagicCube will oversee the large-scale deployment and management of IoT and mobile-secure solutions to consumers.
MagicCube last year received the first certification of a software-based Trusted Execution Environment issued by EMVCo, the consortium owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay, and Visa Inc. that facilitates secure interoperability and acceptance of payment and digital transactions globally.
“Many believe that MagicCube’s hardware-free software platform has ushered in a new era in security by making it safe and easy for merchants to use any mobile or IoT device to conduct payments,” said Gen Tsuchikawa, Chief Investment Officer, Sony Innovation Fund.
Seen as best-in-class means of payment acceptance that is also a seamless experience for customers at the point of scale, MagicCube had the early backing of Azure Capital, Bold Capital, Epic Ventures, NTT Data, and Visa Inc. that the Sony Innovation Fund now joins. It is the Fund’s first FinTech investment outside of Japan that was done in pursuit of tech startups for investment and collaboration that have the potential to disrupt industries. Sony and its global network of partners serve as early opportunities for their strategic startup investments.
MagicCube Co-founders Nancy Zayed and Sam Shawki stated, “We are delighted to see an industry giant like Sony supporting the new paradigm of mobile and IoT device security that we call Software Defined Trust (SDT). As always, when software replaces hardware, everything becomes downloadable and upgradable, allowing the market to grow exponentially.”
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