Saving Face: Investment in Recognition Tech Heats Up in China

SHANGHAI--A Chinese startup that sells facial recognition systems to police forces secured venture-capital funding that values it at more than $1.5 billion, underscoring the sector's emergence as one of technology's hottest areas of interest. Beijing-based SenseTime Co., which provides surveillance systems using facial recognition to Chinese law enforcement agencies, said Tuesday it raised $410 million in new funding from investors, lifting it to so-called unicorn status with a value of more than $1 billion. Using artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems from SenseTime and others can identify people in a crowd by matching their faces against those on file in image databases. Facial recognition works by breaking down a person's face into a series of measurements and using them to create a template that can be compared with others in a database. In China, adoption has been especially swift, aided by a large network of surveillance cameras, a national photo ID index and relatively few concerns about privacy.