Jeff Maynard

Walk up to almost any login screen and the assumption is the same. You type a string of characters, and the machine trusts that a matching string means the right person. Maynard spent close to two decades arguing that the assumption is backwards. A typed password proves knowledge, not identity. His answer, BioSig-ID, asks you to draw four characters with a finger or a mouse, then measures the angle, speed, length, and order of the strokes. The drawing is the password and the way you make it is the biometric.

Today he is founder, president, and CEO of Biometric Signature ID, based in the Dallas-Lewisville area. The company is small by headcount but wide in reach. Its technology has been used across 95 countries, and the flagship product runs entirely in a browser. There is nothing to download, no reader to plug in, and no personal phone required. That constraint is the whole point. Maynard has repeatedly framed hardware and app dependencies as friction that keeps good security from being adopted.

The upstairs office

The origin story is unusually specific. Before Biometric Signature ID, Maynard was President of Security Biometrics, a small publicly traded company, and had earlier run divisions of a publicly traded firm that used biometrics in healthcare. He was also a co-founder of eScript Systems and had developed patented biometric signature inventions. The turning point, by his account, came during a conversation with the DEA in Virginia about how to securely verify physicians prescribing controlled substances.

They thought they could. What followed was not a funding round or a launch event but a long, quiet build. "For two years I funded my CTO to work in my upstairs office and we created what we have today," Maynard has said. The company that emerged in 2007 was co-founded with his wife, Cindy Maynard, who serves as its chief marketing officer. It has stayed a husband-and-wife venture at the top ever since.

Why draw a password at all

Maynard's case against the alternatives is pointed. Fingerprints and facial scans are static: once copied, they cannot be changed. He has criticized facial recognition specifically for being invasive and for high error rates affecting people of color. A drawn gesture, by contrast, behaves like a normal password. If it is ever compromised, the user simply picks a new one.

The contest nobody won

To make the point that a drawn password is hard to fake, the company ran a public spoofing challenge with a cash prize for anyone who could replicate a simple password such as "Mom." Over roughly a decade, more than 24,000 people around the world tried. According to the company, none succeeded and the prize went unclaimed. It is the kind of stunt that doubles as a product demo, and it fits Maynard's habit of turning a security abstraction into something a person can picture.

Where the technology landed

The early validation was hard to top. Maynard says BioSig-ID was selected by the White House, out of roughly 180 companies, to pilot the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. From there the company found its clearest market in higher education, verifying that the student logging into an online course or exam is the enrolled student. Maynard has called the company a market leader in student ID verification.

That focus produced one of its most concrete wins. Working with bank regulators, Biometric Signature ID's technology helped expose a cheating ring in which paid contractors completed required courses for more than 600 mortgage loan officers spread across dozens of states and agencies. Behavioral biometrics, in that case, did more than let people in. They revealed who was actually at the keyboard.

The founder in the details

Maynard tends to talk about the technology in the plain terms of a person who has explained it thousands of times: the cost of a help-desk password reset, the friction of an app you have to install, the fact that nearly half of first-time users found drawing their password entertaining rather than annoying. His title on LinkedIn reads less like a slogan and more like a to-do list, spanning company formation, growth strategy, profitable operations, and capital funding. That range is characteristic of a founder who has kept a lean company independent for close to twenty years rather than optimizing for a fast exit.

The ambition has not narrowed. The company has talked about native mobile, and about carrying gesture authentication into AR and VR environments and metaverse payments, where proving identity without a physical token becomes even more useful. It is a logical extension of the founding thesis: wherever people need to prove they are themselves, they should be able to do it with something they can perform and, if needed, reset.

In his own words

Good to know

• BioSig-ID runs in a browser on any device, with no special hardware or software to install.
• The gesture password is the rare biometric you can reset, like forgetting and re-choosing a passphrase.
• Maynard argues facial recognition is too invasive and too error-prone to be the default for identity.
• The business was built as a partnership with his wife Cindy, who leads marketing.
• By the company's numbers, 48% of first-time users found drawing their password entertaining.