The Fingerprint Company That Samsung Never Bought Is Now Everywhere

Two years ago, a press release was posted to the website of Fingerprint Cards AB, announcing that the Swedish fingerprint sensor maker would be acquired by Samsung in a $650 million deal. That announcement was later retracted and bizarrely debunked as false, and Fingerprint Cards has basically been absent from the public eye ever since. But the Gothenburg-based firm has kept busy behind the scenes, and now it finds itself enjoying a leading role, highlighted most recently by the use of its sensors in Google’s Nexus 5X and 6P smartphones. That’s right, the company that Samsung didn’t buy is now responsible for Nexus Imprint, the technology that Google is using to enable fingerprint verification in the latest version of Android and the newly introduced Android Pay service.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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