Some startups begin with grand visions. Quekey began with a simple, relatable frustration, two friends struggling to log into a website on someone else’s laptop.

For founders Pritam Sarkar and Imanul Siddique, that moment was more than an inconvenience. It was the spark for a deep-tech idea:
Why should digital identity be trapped inside devices and ecosystems? Why can’t your face be the only key you ever need?

Today, that idea has turned into Quekey, a platform-agnostic facial authentication system aiming to make logging in as effortless as looking into a mirror.

A Friendship Rooted in Creativity, Failure, and Persistence

Pritam and Imanul aren’t typical deep-tech founders who grew up writing code or dreaming of Silicon Valley. Their story stretches back more than a decade to a small town in West Bengal, where they met not in a startup lab but at a school exhibition.

Their journey started with home-built science projects, self-taught tinkering, and a shared appetite for execution.

Before Quekey, they experimented with:

• Ten Community – a pre-Jio YouTube platform for showcasing local talent

• Campus Pro – a pre-Internshala model connecting students with internships before such access became mainstream

Both projects saw early traction but also faced harsh realities, especially when COVID shut campuses down and their internship model collapsed overnight.
Yet, failure didn’t push them away, it made their conviction firmer.

“We never started to become entrepreneurs. We started because we love solving problems,”
Pritam says.

The Moment That Changed Everything

Years later, while sitting together in Kolkata, a simple barrier triggered their next big idea.

Pritam needed to quickly log into a website on Imanul’s laptop, but the Google sign-in process demanded his entire Google account be synced on a device that wasn’t his.

That’s when it clicked.

Why does identity travel with the device? Why should users compromise privacy just to access their accounts?

Imanul built a basic prototype: a facial login that works across any device, operating system, or browser.

No password.
No OTP.
No ecosystem lock-in.
Just you, your face.... anywhere.

Building the Technology: A Lone Developer and a Big Vision

Here’s the unbelievable part:
Imanul wrote the entire foundational codebase himself.

A full framework.
A custom architecture.
A face-based authentication pipeline built from scratch.

Pritam jokes that his own role in testing comes from being a “bad developer,” ensuring that if he can understand it, anyone can.

Integration takes less than 15 minutes, making it attractive for startups and large enterprises alike.

The duo even built:

• A developer dashboard,

• SDKs for quick integration,

• A forthcoming developer community,

• And an enterprise-focused fine-tuned LLM to troubleshoot implementation issues.

This is not just a product. It is an ecosystem in the making.

Recognition Without Funding: The Startup That Attracted Giants

Despite being early-stage and bootstrapped, Quekey has been accepted into major global accelerator and support programmes, including:

• AWS Activate

• Microsoft for Startups

• MongoDB for Startups

• NVIDIA Inception

NVIDIA even offered access to virtual GPUs and expert technical review, support rarely extended to a two-person team from India.

These credits helped keep their servers running and cut infrastructure costs by lakhs, allowing them to focus entirely on product development.

Today, six enterprise partners are already integrating Quekey into their systems.

Security, AI, and the Future of Trust

As a cybersecurity product, Quekey cannot afford even a single breach.

The founders know this.

They’ve built multi-layered encryption, onion-style data protection, and a system where even a worst-case breach reveals nothing.

On whether AI or quantum computing will break modern encryption?

Imanul is clear:

“If hacking AI gets advanced, the defence AI will advance too. It’s always a race, and we’re building for that future.”

For them, transparency is non-negotiable.
Users should always know what data is being used, why, and how it’s protected.

Advice to Future Founders

The founders ended the conversation with a message for new entrepreneurs:

• Solve a real problem you love, not one trending online.

• Dark days will come, and only passion, not glamour, will keep you going.

• Take responsibility for whatever technology you build.

• And most importantly,

“Always put the user first.”

What Comes Next for Quekey?

A public release is planned for January.
Enterprise pilots are in motion.
And an active fundraiser is underway, as they prepare to scale team, operations, and GTM efforts.

But beneath the ambition, there’s still the same spirit that began years ago in a school exhibition stall, a desire to build things that make life better.

Pritam frames it perfectly:

“When we started, we had nothing. But we had each other and a problem worth solving.
That’s still enough.”