Israeli AI-driven facial recognition company AnyVision has announced that it has raised $43 million from existing investors including investment funds and private investors.
This announcement followed hard on the heels several hours earlier of reports that AnyVision's shareholders are in advanced talks with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. to spin off the startup's defense activities into a joint venture, leaving AnyVision to focus on its commercial and homeland security facial recognition operations.
AnyVision said that the new funding will be used "to scale its Touchless Access Control and Remote Authentication products at a time when demand for innovative technologies that help companies meet the challenges of the new reality is soaring."
AnyVision is controlled by its founders CEO Eylon Etshtein and Prof. Shlomo Ben-Artzi and businessman Avihai Stolero who bought drone-maker Aeronautics together with Rafael. AnyVision has 240 employees in Tel Aviv, New York, Mexico, London and Singapore.
Etshtein said, "Facial authentication is a core technology for enabling frictionless, intelligent operations. We offer the most accurate, enterprise-grade solution in the market today to help our customers create safer, seamless experiences for people returning to work and by providing better, faster access to remote services on personal devices. With this additional funding, AnyVision will accelerate the delivery of these critical capabilities for businesses that are reimagining the way people access physical spaces and virtual services, both now and beyond the current crisis."
AnyVision raised $31 million in its last financing round in June 2019 from Microsoft's M12 fund, DFJ Growth Fund, and Eyal Ofer's OG Fund and the company has raised $117 million to date, including this latest financing round.
AnyVision COO Alex Zilberman said, "What sets AnyVision apart is that we offer unrivaled accuracy, performance and privacy protection in a unified visual intelligence platform that’s built for scale. Our core algorithm is trained on the most diverse data sets in the most challenging, real-world conditions and delivers the most accurate recognition in the industry, with or without masks. More than that, our technology was engineered to protect individual privacy and eliminate risk from data breaches by storing only a mathematical vector of a person’s face, making it impossible to trace back to a users’ identity. That’s a combination that no other vendor in the computer vision space can match."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 4, 2020 © Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2020