Megvii, the China-based facial recognition technology developer also known as Face++, has received approximately $460m in a round featuring diversified conglomerate SK Group, contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn as well as Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate of e-commerce group Alibaba.
Face++ provides a free facial detection and recognition API to developers and enterprises. E-commerce group Alibaba and Jiayuan, one of China’s biggest dating sites both use the software, as does financial services provider Ant Financial, and its systems draw on identification files the Chinese government holds on its citizens.
Foxconn had committed $20m to Megvii in November 2016, in a round that also featured CCB International Holdings, part of financial services group China Construction Bank Corporation. That round eventually reached $100m the following month.
This is far the largest round raised by a business in the facial recognition space to receive corporate backing. There have been so far rather few disclosed corporate-backed deals in that realm, as historical bar chart of GCV Analytics suggests. It remains to be seen how much further this very narrow technology will grow.
