VeriFone Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: PAY) today announced that it has signed an agreement to become the lead investor in a Series B financing of Semtek Corporation, and has doubled its investment in the security technology developer and acquired an option at a future date to purchase the remaining shares in Semtek.
Additionally, VeriFone and Semtek have entered into an expanded, worldwide distribution agreement which provides for open-licensing of the Semtek encryption technology to all other point-of-sale hardware vendors.
Semtek is the developer of encryption technology that is the core element of VeriFone's VeriShield Protect end-to-end encryption solution for securing cardholder data. Based on the AES standard, Semtek's technology ensures that the encrypted card data can be used by a typical point-of-sale software system without any modifications or disruption.
In September, VeriFone entered into a marketing agreement with RBS Worldpay to make VeriShield Protect a preferred security platform for RBS customers and is currently negotiating similar arrangements with other payment processors. Additionally, several national retailers have recently selected VeriShield Protect as the platform of choice for fixed-format encryption of credit card data in their enterprises.
"We are very pleased with our growing relationship and look forward to continued success and market traction," said VeriFone CEO Douglas G. Bergeron.
Semtek CEO Patrick Hazel said: "We are delighted to complete this latest round of funding with VeriFone, Venrock Capital, and RRE Ventures. Our newly expanded relationship with VeriFone will accelerate the worldwide adoption of our technology, which is rapidly becoming the global standard for payment card encryption."