AI Update: A Look at the Shifting Business Landscape for Identity Tech

ChatGPT and DALL-E have helped to stoke remarkable excitement about artificial intelligence technologies in recent months, and this has helped to transform the business landscape for a wide swath of the tech sector, including the identity space. So it’s worth taking some time to look at the more notable developments and trends of the moment:

Sequoia Capital’s new focus: early-stage startups. The company announced last week that it was spinning off its China- and India-focused operations into discrete firms (dubbed “HongShan” and “Peak XV Partners”, respectively), and is now writing smaller cheques as it looks to back companies “with no sales and few staff”, reports Bloomberg. Investments through its seed fund program, Arc, tend to range in size from $500,000 to $1 million.

The UK is trying to woo Silicon Valley big shots. To do that, the government has deployed Joe White, a former Venture Capitalist and tech executive, as its ambassador in the Valley. He’s been wining and dining with tech execs and VCs, and inviting them to work with UK authorities as they craft a nuanced regulatory landscape that is “pro-innovation” — and very much in contrast against the European Union’s approach. AI is clearly in White’s crosshairs, but the UK has already demonstrated its willingness to establish tech-friendly regulatory frameworks in the realm of digital ID, through initiatives like the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF) and the Digital Identity Certification Scheme (DICS).

The European Parliament has overwhelmingly approved the AI Act. In a plenary vote, lawmakers rejected a last-minute amendment that would have allowed the use of real-time biometric identification by law enforcement authorities in extreme circumstances such as preventing terrorist attacks. Still, divisions within parliament over the issue may yet lead to such carveouts; this being the European Union, further negotiations lie ahead, with the AI Act now proceeding to a “trilogue” stage in which final details are hammered out between the Members of European Parliament, the EU Council of Ministers, and the European Commission.

Sophisticated technologies developed by Thales are being used in a new concept car from Software République. Software République is a multi-party consortium committed to the development of Europe-made technologies for “sustainable, sovereign and safe mobility,” according to a statement. The H1st Vision concept car, unveiled at the VivaTech event in Paris, uses gait and facial recognition to identify the driver upon their approach to the vehicle, and also features a “Digital ID Wallet” that is integrated into the car itself. Thales says the concept car was developed in just six months. Other members of Software République include Atos, Dassault Systèmes, Orange, Renault Group, and STMicroelectronics.

Neurotechnology has launched a new version of its Face Verification system. It can now detect whether a person enrolling their own face is wearing glasses or a hat, and can generate a warning if those accessories prevent alignment with a given application’s quality requirements. Version 13.1 also delivers an age estimation feature, and supports the use of GPU processing, which can significantly increase the number of concurrent requests that can be processed on a single server. Business Development Director Antonello Mincone says that the company has leveraged some of the same technologies used in Neurotechnology’s large-scale biometric projects in the upgraded Face Verification platform.

OCR Labs has rebranded as “IDVerse”. The idea is to better reflect the breadth of its portfolio of technology solutions, which now extends far beyond Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and includes biometric liveness detection and age verification, among other solutions. The company will also place a new emphasis on what it calls “Zero Bias AI”. “Our diversity of background, skills, and experience allows us to build the future of identity verification – a single point of access for everything your customers want to do online, across all devices, everywhere in the world they happen to be,” said CEO John Myers.

Sophisticated Israel-based startup Deepchecks has raised $14 million in seed funding. The company is working on a platform to continuously test machine learning models, helping to ensure their integrity. It has launched an open source version of its solution, and is also testing a paid product called “Deepchecks Hub”. Its solution could prove important to companies developing AI-driven biometrics and computer vision solutions. Deepchecks says its open source offering has already seen half a million downloads and that it’s being used by major names including AWS and Wix.

Investment deals in the cybersecurity space have fallen 50% year over year. They’ve dropped from 326 in Q1 of 2022 to 170 in the latest quarter, according to research by Momentum Cybersecurity. But the leading sectors – risk & compliance; data security; security operation, incident response, and threat intelligence; and identity & access management – made up half of those as they continue to see sustained investor interest. Looking ahead, a partner with the Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock Partners told the Wall Street Journal that AI is seeing exuberant interest, and that “a new wave of intelligent cybersecurity products will emerge that leverage AI to help enterprises tackle everything from e-commerce and financial fraud, to spear phishing and business email compromise, to account takeovers and advanced ransomware.”

PassiveBolt has named Rahul Parthe as a strategic advisor and investor. The company is a startup focused on using decentralized identity technology for access control. Parthe is the co-founder, Chairman, and CTO of TECH5, a biometrics specialist that recently teamed up with PassiveBolt, as well as ZKTeco and PDQ Manufacturing, to develop a decentralized biometric access solution. In a statement announcing his new role with PassiveBolt, the startup also noted that Parthe “was the key biometric system architect of UIDAI program”, referring to the government entity behind India’s pioneering biometric national ID system, Aadhaar.

Stay tuned to FindBiometrics for more updates on the AI landscape as momentum continues to pick up!

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June 16, 2023 – by Alex Perala