Face.com () was an Israeli technology company that developed a platform for efficient and accurate

facial recognition Facial recognition or face recognition may refer to: *Face detection, often a step done before facial recognition *Face perception, the process by which the human brain understands and interprets the face *Pareidolia, which involves, in part, seein ...

in photos uploaded via web and mobile applications. Face.com apps and

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

services scanned billions of photos monthly and tagged faces in those photos, tying them to social networking information. As of February 2011, the company had "discovered" 18 billion faces across its API and Facebook applications. The company was established in 2009 in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( or , ; ), sometimes rendered as Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and usually referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the Gush Dan metropolitan area of Israel. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline and with a popula ...

, and maintained an office with 10 employees. Face.com developed and released two Facebook applications: Photo Finder and Photo Tagger. Photo Finder allowed users to find untagged pictures of themselves as well as friends on Facebook and then tag those photos. Photo Tagger enabled bulk-tagging of faces that appear in multiple photos uploaded to the Facebook website. On June 18, 2012, the company announced that it had been acquired by

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. It was also announced that they were winding up their API's to focus on new Facebook products.

REST API Program

In March 2010, Face.com opened an Alpha of their free

REST REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

API, allowing third-party developers to integrate the Face.com facial recognition technology, algorithms, and database of tagged faces with their own apps and services. The REST API gave developers free access to all of the platform's technology, with some applicable rate limits, while also offering white listing and premium licensing options. With the API, developers could tag and recognize users from Facebook and

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, attach Face.com technology to their own index of images, or even mix and match facial recognition across photo sources, including Facebook, Twitter,

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by ...

, and more. In February 2011, Face.com's API program moved from Alpha to Beta, increasing the rate limit from 200 scanned photos per hour to 5,000 photos per hour. As of February 10, more than 10,000 developers were using the Face API.

Funding

Face.com raised a total of $5.3 million in funding for their face recognition technology. A

Series A A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

round, totaling $1 million, was raised in February 2009. On September 27, 2010, the company announced that it had closed a Series B round of $4.3 million, led by previous investor Rhodium and Russia-based investor

Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

. On June 18, 2012, the company was acquired by

for an undisclosed sum estimated to be between $55 and $60 million.

University of Massachusetts study

In 2011, a study conducted at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

compared a portion of the Face.com

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

, and found it to have a recognition rate of 0.91.{{cite web, title=Labeled Faces in the Wild, url=http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html, publisher=University of Massachusetts

Update

As of June 2012 Face.com was sold to Facebook. The Technology is continued under the project

DeepFace DeepFace is a deep learning facial recognition system created by a research group at Facebook. It identifies human faces in digital images. The program employs a nine-layer neural network with over 120 million connection weights and was trained on ...

. As of December 2015 the domain Face.com was sold to an e-commerce company.

References

Israeli companies established in 2009 Facial recognition software Meta Platforms acquisitions Online companies of Israel Mergers and acquisitions of Israeli companies 2012 mergers and acquisitions Israeli inventions