palm-recognition
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Wink Wanted to Kill the Password. Then It Found the Payment Rails.
Wink began with a clever premise: any ordinary camera could become a checkout credential. Its 2025 merger with Phoenix Managed Networks turned that identity layer into a payments business with real rails, real distribution and a much harder question about trust.
Deptrum
Deptrum (光鉴科技) is a Chinese 3D vision company founded in 2018 by three Silicon Valley scientists, including a former Apple depth-hardware lead. It builds full-stack 3D depth-sensing solutions - nanophotonic chips, structured-light and Time-of-Flight cameras, and AI perception algorithms - that let machines see and measure the physical world. Its hardware powers robots, smart cockpits, palm-payment terminals, smartphones and new-retail systems across finance, automotive and IoT.
Li Zhu
Li Zhu is the founder and CEO of Deptrum (光鉴科技), a 3D vision company building full-stack depth-sensing hardware and software powered by nanophotonics and AI. A Tsinghua undergraduate and UC Berkeley PhD in nano-optoelectronics, he led the depth camera module team behind Apple's iPhone X Face ID before leaving in 2018 to build a structured-light approach that sidesteps Apple's patent monopoly. Deptrum's depth cameras now ship into smartphones, smart cockpits, robots, IoT devices and palm-payment systems, and the company has raised through a Series B.