Huawei acquires intellectual property rights of Russian facial recognition firm Vokord

Jun 3, 2019, 12:59 pm EDT | Stephen Mayhew

Russian media outlets Vedomosti and RT are reporting that Huawei has purchased the intellectual property rights to facial recognition systems designed by Moscow-based Vokord.

According to media sources Huawei Russia and Hong Kong-based Huawei Digital Technologies will become the owners of the intellectual property rights for Vokord’s face identification patents and hardware and that some employees of Vokord will also be transferred to Huawei as part of the agreement.

Vokord was founded in 1999 and designs software and programming solutions based on computer vision and intelligent video processing algorithms. The company focuses on facial recognition, automatic license plate recognition, video analytics and pattern recognition, video processing, and video enhancement. In 2017 the company’s revenue totaled 113.2 million rubles (US$1.75 million).

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin recently said that he will soon announce a competition to create a large-scale biometric surveillance system using the 167,000 cctv cameras deployed throughout the city.

In April Sberbank signed a deal to acquire a 51% stake in Russian biometrics firm Speech Technology Center.