Israeli Facial Recognition Tech Startup AnyVision Raises Additional $43M

Israeli facial recognition startup AnyVision has raised an additional $43 million in funding, the company announced on Thursday.

Founded in 2014 by Eylon Etshtein and Prof. Neil Robertson the company creates AI-powered visual intelligence software and specializes in face, body, and object recognition products.

The funding is being used to scale the company’s Touchless Access Control and Remote Authentication products. AnyVision said that at a time when demand for innovative technologies that help companies meet the challenges of the new reality is soaring, the company sees significant growth for their Touchless Access Control across all verticals within organizations that host large numbers of people in shared spaces.

“Facial authentication is a core technology for enabling frictionless, intelligent operations,” said Etshtein. “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’s touchless access control capability utilizes facial recognition to identify people as they approach a physical point of entry. The system initiates the authentication process when the individual is three meters away from the door. That door opens as soon as that person’s identity is verified, allowing them to enter a space without slowing down or interacting with doorknobs, terminals, or other shared touchpoints.

AnyVision’s remote authentication capability leverages the same powerful AI platform through a mobile SDK to authenticate users who are accessing a service from a personal device. The technology compares an individual’s face from the device camera to an official ID to verify a match while multiple neural networks check a comprehensive set of parameters against a live selfie video to ensure a person is live and not a print or digital image, or screen replay. All of this happens in less than 1 second, creating a frictionless and secure authentication experience that increases customer conversion.

AnyVision reports strong demand for its software to easily onboard and authenticate new and returning users of banking, travel, healthcare and online gaming services in particular.

“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,” said AnyVision Chief Operating Officer Alex Zilberman.

“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,” he added.