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Fresh off a $5.5 million fundraising effort, Atlanta-based Liberty Defense is expanding into Europe to help airports there detect concealed weapons and threats.
Liberty is working with N4R B.V., a Dutch consultancy with 20 years of aviation security experience, to make inroads with its HEXWAVE system. Using 3D imaging software licensed from and artificial intelligence for analytics, the device can scan crowds for “metallic and non-metallic threat objects.”
The Dutch partnership is fitting, as consultant Gunther van Adrichem helped deploy in Europe the millimeter-wave technology that similar to that which Liberty utilizes through an exclusive license with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Liberty raised the C$7.13 million in a brokered private placement in Canada (about $5.5 million) to expand the reach of HEXWAVE and to deploy a newly licensed scanning technology invented by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Funded originally by the Department of Homeland Security, the technology is pitched as having the potential to “make removing shoes at the airport a thing of the past.”
Traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange venture market, over-the-counter markets and Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Liberty on July 1 kicked off a federally funded project to integrate Israeli firm Levitection’s system into HEXWAVE, allowing it to serve as an “early warning system.”
The project is undertaken with a $1 million grant disbursed through the BIRD Foundation, a program funded by the DHS and the Israel Ministry of Public Security to foster joint research.