New Funds for Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI

In New York, facial recognition start-up Clearview AI has raised $30m in a Series B round of funding, which values the company at $130m.

Clearview offers access to a database of more than three billion 'faceprints' - unique biometric identifiers akin to fingerprint or DNA profiles - drawn from personal photos on users' social media accounts and elsewhere online. The firm's proprietary image-search technology enables law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, as well as their victims, by matching a single, unidentified photograph with publicly available, open-sourced images from the Internet. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the company, describing its surveillance activities as a 'threat to privacy, safety, and security'.

The new investment includes funds from unnamed institutional investors and family offices, adding to Clearview's previous $7m in Series A funding in 2019, as well as prior undisclosed amounts of investment from Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, and Naval Ravikant, the co-founder of consumer product review site Epinions.

Clearview co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That (pictured) comments: 'Law enforcement agencies continue to evolve and adopt new technology by necessity, and Clearview's revolutionary image search and identification capabilities have proven to be a game-changer in bringing unidentified criminals to justice'.

Web site: www.clearview.ai .