Alitheon lands $11.6M for tech that assigns digital fingerprints to objects

Imagine mail without postage stickers, airplane luggage without bag tags, and paper money that’s authenticated not by ink or watermarks but the fibers of the paper itself. That’s the vision behind Alitheon, a Bellevue, Wash.-based startup that raised $11.6 million as part of a seed round. Alitheon’s technology, called FeaturePrint, uses regular cameras. But instead of taking photos, the system creates a kind of digital fingerprint for each individual object. The result is a new way of authenticating physical objects with machines — one that could replace barcodes, RFID tags and QR codes.