Yoti awarded in Safety Tech Challenge Fund challenge

Yoti has received two rounds of funding as a prize for participating in the UK government’s Safety Tech Challenge Fund initiative, one in collaboration with Galaxkey and Image Analyzer and another in partnership with DragonflAI.

The jointly developed solutions designed as part of the program focus on tackling child sexual abuse and demonstrating how end-to-end encryption and artificial intelligence-powered image analysis can be used for this purpose.

In particular, the partnership between Yoti, Galaxkey and Image Analyzer created a messaging platform featuring Yoti’s facial age estimation technology, which is used to detect explicit content before it is sent. The companies said they intend to develop the solution further in the future, to introduce analysis of voice, text, and URLs.

The collaboration with DragonflAI focused on the creation of a solution capable of instantly detecting a person’s age in explicit content on a device and offline. DragonflAI’s nudity detection algorithm has a reported accuracy of 97.9 percent.

Upon detecting nudity using DragonflAI’s algorithms, the app would then allow successful moderation of illegal content without third-party technologies being involved.

“We are proud to be putting our solutions forward to encourage innovation, helping change the digital space to better protect children online,” comments Yoti CEO Robin Tombs.

The Safety Tech Challenge Fund was created by the UK Government and winners have been awarded £85,000 (approximately US$115,000) to allow further development of the proposed solutions.

They will also receive mentorship and support from the Department of Culture Media and Sport, the Home Office, GCHQ, and its delivery partner, PUBLIC, following which their technologies will be evaluated by the independent academic institution REPHRAIN.

“We thank the Safety Tech Challenge Fund for welcoming the use of tech to tackle the rise in online-linked sexual crimes, and look forward to working with our partners to create tools that make the internet a safer place for children,” Tombs concludes.

The awards come weeks after Yoti’s facial age estimation technology received regulatory approval in Germany for use with online services.

Article Topics

age verification  |  AI  |  biometrics  |  funding  |  image analysis  |  research and development  |  Yoti