Face.com

Photo tagging before the deep learning era

Face.com was based in Tel Aviv. Its founders included Gil Hirsch, the CEO, Eden Shochat, Yaniv Taigman and Moti Shniberg, according to Haaretz. Sources differ on the founding year: according to Reuters, the company was founded in 2007, while Haaretz said it had received investment since its founding in 2009. According to Haaretz, its first product launched in 2009. The company developed apps that recognized people in photos uploaded to Facebook and suggested tagging them. Among other things, it developed KLIK, an iPhone camera app that offered automatic tagging of friends. According to Reuters, KLIK had about 40,000 monthly active users on Facebook.

A developer interface and a Facebook supplier

The company also offered an application programming interface (API) for developers that could recognize people in photos and even estimate their age. According to Haaretz, the company raised about $5 million, and its most prominent outside investors were Yandex, which held 18.4 percent of the shares, and the Rhodium fund. Even before the acquisition, Facebook used its technology: when a user uploaded new photos, the system compared the faces with earlier photos and suggested name tags. Facebook itself described the acquisition as bringing in house a long-time technology supplier. According to Haaretz, in January 2011 Face.com turned down an acquisition offer worth tens of millions of dollars.

The 2012 acquisition

On 18 June 2012, Facebook announced that it was acquiring Face.com. The terms of the deal were not published. Media reports cited a figure of $80 million to $100 million, and technology sites abroad reported $55 million to $60 million in cash and stock, with the final price depending on the value of Facebook's stock. According to Haaretz, the company had 11 employees at the time of the announcement. No official closing date was published, but by 9 July 2012 Face.com's home page showed a notice that the company had been acquired by Facebook. In those same days the company shut down its developer interface and removed KLIK from the app store. Already in 2012, the technology and the acquisition raised privacy concerns, and even before that Facebook had made it easier for users to turn off face recognition in photos, in response to requests from privacy groups.

From Face.com to DeepFace

In March 2014, Facebook published DeepFace, a paper presented at the CVPR conference that year. According to Slate, its authors included Yaniv Taigman, a co-founder of Face.com, alongside Ming Yang and Marc'Aurelio Ranzato of Facebook's AI team and Prof. Lior Wolf of Tel Aviv University. According to the paper's abstract, the system combined 3D modeling of the face with a deep neural network of nine layers and more than 120 million parameters. It was trained on four million images of more than 4,000 people. On the standard LFW benchmark it reached an accuracy of 97.35 percent and reduced the error rate of the leading method at the time by more than 27 percent.

Its place in the story

Face.com is an early example of a pattern that repeats in the list of Israeli companies: a small team in Tel Aviv that developed a core capability, a technology giant that used it as a customer, and in the end an acquisition that brought the team inside. It also shows the shift in face recognition from earlier methods to deep learning, and the fact that people moved with the technology from company to company. Its story was accompanied from the start by privacy questions, which are still at the center of the debate about face recognition. On the map of companies, Face.com is classified as a company acquired by Meta, Facebook's current name.