FIVE

Five (Five ID, five.id) develops palm-recognition technology that identifies a person instantly so they can pay and be authenticated without a card, phone or app. Its product is a compact countertop terminal with an angled display and a palm sensor that accepts both palm-biometric transactions and standard contactless card payments, and integrates with merchants' existing point-of-sale systems and business tools. Enrolment takes roughly 30 seconds: a customer scans their palm once and links a payment method, after which they can authenticate at any Five-enabled terminal. Customers can also link credit cards, loyalty programmes, gym memberships and bank accounts to the platform, with loyalty points applied automatically at checkout without QR codes or apps.

The company builds both its software and hardware in-house and uses machine-learning models for biometric matching. Its system authenticates users via palm-vein biometrics and routes transactions across multiple payment rails, bypassing traditional Visa and Mastercard infrastructure. Five states that palm data is encrypted end to end, is never shared or sold, can be deleted by the customer at any time, and that the service is GDPR-compliant. The company markets checkout in 0.3 seconds and a roughly 90 percent reduction in checkout time.

Beyond payments, Five describes a longer-term aim of broader identity authentication, including age-restricted purchases handled through privacy-preserving "yes/no" checks rather than the sharing of personal data.

Founding story

Five was founded in 2024 by Maria Marti Garcia and Thibaut Genevrier, both formerly of Revolut, where they worked on some of the company's fastest-growing products; Marti Garcia had been part of Revolut's SME payments team before leaving to build an alternative to card-network payments.

Business model

Five sells a payment terminal and biometric authentication platform to merchants. Palm transactions are offered at no cost to the merchant, while card payments are charged at what the company describes as competitive rates, positioning the offering as a way for merchants to lower payment costs from day one.

Merchant-facing payments: palm transactions are free to merchants and card payments are priced at competitive processing rates.

Traction

Since commercial launch in June 2025, Five reported 374,000 processed transactions and 2,500 enrolled palm users, roughly 80 terminals in the UK and Ireland, and $20 million in annualized payment volume as of May 2026. The team numbered 10 people.

Latest developments

In May 2026 the company announced a $6 million raise to scale its palm biometric payment system, bringing total funding to $8.5 million, and said it was focused on scaling deployments, expanding its team and growing its merchant base, including U.S. expansion. It is also monitoring developments in stablecoins and cryptocurrencies and hiring for Android engineering, backend engineering and product design roles.