Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei has acquired the face recognition technology of Russian startup Vocord, with patents and equipment and hiring most of the related team, as reported by business daily Vedomosti.
According to the official company register, the deal took place on May 17 when Huawei subsidiaries fully acquired Moscow-based Eagle Softlab.
Earlier this year, Eagle Softlab, which was founded in December 2018, purchased from its sister company Vocord Softlab the patents and equipment related to Vocord’s breakthrough video surveillance and face recognition technology.
Most of the team who worked on the Vocord face recognition algorithm at Vocord Softlab agreed to move to Eagle Softlab.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but experts believe Huawei priced Vocord at $40-$50 million. In January, experts estimated Vocord’s value at $20-$30 million.
Launched in 1999, Vocord is a supplier of the Russian ministry of interior, banks, retailer networks, and stadiums.
In 2016, Vocord’s face recognition algorithm was named the best in the world. At that time, Vocord, whose algorithm is inspired by deep neural networks, was able to correctly identify 75.127% of the faces amid 1 million distractors, the best result in the competition held by MegaFace. However, in the latest MegaFace ranking, Vocord’s deepVo V3 algorithm only ranks 18th.
