AnyVision AI startup locks in $28M for its body and facial recognition tech

As image recognition advances continue to accelerate, startups with a mind towards security applications are seeing some major interest to turn surveillance systems more intelligent.

AnyVision is working on face, body and object recognition tech and the underlying system infrastructure to help companies deploy smart cameras for various purposes. The tech works when deployed on most types of camera and does not require highly sophisticated sensors to operate, the company says

“It’s not just how accurate the system is, it’s also how much it scales,” Etshtein tells TechCrunch. “You can put more than 20 concurrent full HD camera streams on a single GPU.”

The Tel Aviv-based AI startup announced today that it has closed a $28 million Series A funding round led by Bosch. The quickly growing company already has 130 employees and has plans to open up three new offices by the year’s end.

Right now, AnyVision is working on products in a few different verticals. Its security product called “Better Tomorrow” has been a key focus for the company.

Even as tech giants in the U.S. like Amazon and Google are scrutinized for contracts with government orgs that involve facial recognition tech, Etshtein believes that their company’s solution will be an improvement over existing video surveillance technologies in terms of protecting the public’s privacy.

“Today, the video management systems basically record everything and you can see individuals faces, you can see everything.”Etshtein says. “Once our system is installed it pixelates all the faces in the stream automatically, even the operator in the control center cannot see your face because the mathematical models just represent the persons of interest.”

The company also recently released a product called FaceKey that leverages the company’s facial recognition tech for verification purposes, allowing customers with phones that are not just the iPhone X to use their face as a two-factor authentication method in things like banking apps. Now, there have certainly been a lot of issues with maintaining the needed accuracy which is exactly what has made FaceID so novel, but AnyVision CEO Eylon Etshtein claims to have “cracked the problem.”

Other products AnyVision is working on include some new efforts in the sports and entertainment spaces as well as a retail analytics platform that they’re hoping to release later this summer.