Facial recognition company AnyVision snags $43 million in funding

Israel's AnyVision, a leading provider of AI-enabled visual intelligence software, announced Thursday that it has secured $43 million in funding from investors. 

According to the company, the 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'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 in question. 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, the company says.

AnyVision has raised $117 million from investors to date, including $31 million in its last financing round in June 2019. The investors in the latest round were not specified.

“Facial authentication is a core technology for enabling frictionless, intelligent operations,” said AnyVision CEO Eylon 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.”

The company sees significant growth opportunity for Touchless Access Control across all verticals within organizations that host large numbers of people in shared spaces, such as corporate real estate, banking and financial services, manufacturing, and hospitality.

“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.

He added: “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.”

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, the company says.

Meanwhile, in a related development on Thursday, Israel's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems said it will set up a joint venture with AnyVision to apply facial recognition technology to military systems.