CSIpix is out to solve a problem familiar to all fans of crime fiction: overworked cops waiting days or weeks for fingerprinting results.

The St. John’s startup has developed software that helps forensic investigators quickly find possible matches for fingerprints taken from a crime scene, and then nail down the evidence to help secure a conviction.

“The customer pain we address is finger print examinations being done with a magnifying glass,” John Guzzwell, Vice-President of Business Development, said at the Atlantic Venture Forum last week. “Most police agencies still do it like that.”

The company has considerable traction with 300 clients in 25 countries. They include local, state and federal agencies in the United States, and police forces in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Austria France and Romania. Its core target market is the 18,000 police agencies in the U.S., which is by far the largest police market in the world.

The origins of the company date back to 1999 when Guzzwell and three co-founders began iSYS Corp., a St. John’s company dedicated to image analysis and automation. It specialized in the automated editing of photos for consumers. The team knew it has to find a new market when digital photography became the craze and people stopped printing photos.

So in about 2010 they started CSIpix (which is a product name operated by iSYS) to help with fingerprint identification.

The company now has three main products that help police agencies that lack advanced tools to search and match fingerprints: Comparator, to help investigators compare fingerprints; Matcher, to help find comparable features in two fingerprints; and Case AFIS, which  lets  agencies  search crime scene prints and compare them with a database of the local “usual suspects”.

Guzzwell said that there will always have to be a person to match the prints, in part because the legal system demands a person testify in court to identify the suspect based on the prints. But the strength of CSIpix, said Guzzwell, is that it helps cops to match prints quickly. A delay in an investigation often results in a crime going unsolved. Police using CSIpix’s products can often present suspects with fingerprint evidence while they’re still being interrogated.

“When criminals see evidence like what we’ve prepared, they often immediately begin to plea bargain,” he said.

CSIpix is now a four-member team led by President Patricia LeFeuvre. The team is strong in product development and it now needs to expend in sales and business development. 

The company, which has never raised capital, is looking for investment to help finance the larger team, and has begun to speak to investment  groups about the company’s prospects.

“We need to increase or sales and our marketing activity to expand beyond our current customer base,” said Guzzwell.