This Limerick facial recognition startup has been scooped up by US tech firm
EmotionReader develops AI that recognises people’s emotions in videos.
EMOTIONREADER, A LIMERICK facial recognition startup, has been acquired by a US artificial intelligence company.
The company, founded in 2017, develops facial recognition algorithms that identify and analyse people’s emotions in videos.
Its patent-pending tech uses AI and computer vision – how software identifies objects around it – to detect facial expressions in real-time.
Miami-based firm Kairos is an artificial intelligence company focusing on facial recognition in use cases like customer verification in banking or securing access to buildings.
EmotionReader was founded by Stephen Moore and Padraig O’Leary and had raised funding from Enterprise Ireland.
While the founders are from Limerick, the startup ran most of its research and development from an office in Singapore where it will join up with Kairos’s development team.
The exact terms of the buyout have not been disclosed, but it was described as a multimillion-dollar deal. The company said it will use the funding to focus on expanding in the Asia-Pacific region.
“I believe with recent advances in AI and deep learning, we’re at a tipping point where AI will change the lives of millions of people for the better,” Moore said, who has been appointed chief scientific officer of Kairos.
Fixing bias
Kairos chief executive Brian Brackeen said the pairing of the two companies will help “fix biases in today’s face recognition algorithms”.
The US company is a growing player in the facial recognition space. The EmotionReader deal marks its second acquisition.
Brian Brackeen
Brackeen recently generated headlines by refusing to provide Kairos’s technology to police forces.
The company has previously raised $3.5 million from venture capital funds and has since stepped into the world of blockchain by launching an initial coin offering, where it creates and sells its own cryptocurrency, with the hopes of raising $30 million.
Blockchain refers to the decentralised technology that records and tracks all transactions on a ledger that can be traced and verified. The tech has garnered a lot of attention in the finance sector for its potential applications in sending and receiving secure payments.
