Paravision plans to hire and expand facial recognition reach with $23M funding round

Paravision has raised $23 million in funding, which the company says reflects its emergence as the technology partner of choice in a rapidly growing market, with plans to use the capital to expand its technology and partner-facing teams, accelerate its facial recognition and computer vision development efforts and enhance its support for global deployments.

The funding round was led by J2 Ventures, with participation from digital identity and biometric security system integrator HID Global, along with Marlinspike Capital, Atomic, Icon Ventures, Perot Jain, Red Cell Partners and others.

“We see something truly unique in Paravision,” comments Alex Harstrick, managing general partner of J2 Ventures. “They are a U.S.-based leader in AI, computer vision, and face recognition and a dynamic, focused, and ethical company that has earned the respect and partnership of the world’s leading identity solution providers.”

The expansion of the global market for facial recognition is being driven by demand for fast, accurate, frictionless and touchless identity in a range of applications, including enterprise security, consumer identity verification, government services, travel and payments.

“In partnership, HID and Paravision have already cooperated on projects and we look forward to further advancing our collaboration across a number of different markets and use cases,” says Björn Lidefelt, EVP and head of HID Global.

Assa Abloy subsidiary HID invested in Paravision as a strategic decision that involves embedding facial recognition into its access control and trusted identity solutions to deliver seamless and highly secure user experiences.

Paravision launched its facial recognition to the market in 2018, and has performed well in third-party testing by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Face Recognition Vendor Tests, with error rates in many cases two to three times lower than the next most accurate biometrics provider from the United States, according to the company announcement.

“We feel incredibly fortunate to have such great support from both financial and strategic investors and the opportunity to build upon the technology and market foundation we’ve been able to establish in a relatively short time” states Doug Aley, CEO of Paravision. “It resonates with what we’ve been seeing in the market, which is that partners appreciate the value of true collaboration and the customer benefits of building around the most accurate and resilient technology.”

Paravision has also been moving beyond allegations of improper dataset collection by its former incarnation, deleting the dataset and resulting algorithm prior to an FTC order, establishing a set of ethical development principles and appointing Elizabeth M. Adams as its chief AI ethics advisor.

Article Topics

AI  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  computer vision  |  facial recognition  |  funding  |  HID  |  investment  |  Paravision