The guest of this interview is Mr. Shaun Moore, CEO of Trueface, a startup specialized in creating software for biometric facial recognition and computer vision solution.
Trueface was created for making environments safer and smarter for all through the responsible use of computer vision.
It was founded in 2017. During this years, Trueface raised a seed round of $3.7M.
In 2020, Trueface won the World Aviation Festival startup pitch competition for its biometric facial recognition and computer vision solution.
It also signed its third contract with the U.S. Air Force for base security for computer vision deployment to enhance physical security.
In this interview we will talk us about innovation, tecnologies, the challenges of expanding it abroad and more.
Questions for Shaun Moore
- Hello and welcome to our blog! Could you please introduce Trueface to our readers and say a little more about the company?
- How did you come up with the idea of launching this startup?
- What are the market sectors in which Trueface is developed?
- What are your most innovative products or services?
- How does your system find a face among a thousand just in a few seconds?
- What is the distinctive feature of the Trueface’s services?
- What makes Truceface attractive to the eyes of the investors?
- What kind of consequences have created the current privacy regulations on your products?
- How can your products guarantee the privacy of a person?
- How do the privacy regulations of the different markets you operate in affect the sale of your products?
- How do you develop a successful relationship with possible investors?
- If you could give just one piece of advice to an aspiring startup founder, what would it be?
1. Hello and welcome to our blog! Could you please introduce Trueface to our readers and say a little more about the company?
At Trueface, we teach computers to see like humans; interpreting the data they ingest.
Once trained to understand the visual data in question, computers help businesses and agencies make instant decisions, allowing businesses to reduce costs and agencies to redistribute human capital to higher-functioning tasks.
Since day one, Trueface has been focused on achieving equal facial recognition performance for all.
Trueface is focused on transparency and communicating the limitations of face recognition and the steps necessary to advance the industry.
Our clients choose Trueface because we are committed to the responsible deployment of computer vision technology and they want to ensure their businesses and their customers are benefiting from the advancements of artificial intelligence.
2. How did you come up with the idea of launching this startup?
Myself and my co-founder, Nezare, were spending time at a surf hostel in Taghazout Morocco while researching various interesting technologies.
We were intrigued by the hardware revolution and the ability to fund a product through crowdfunding campaigns.
We came across a research paper published about the FBI switching from fingerprint to face recognition and we knew it would be a fundamental change to how our society identified individuals.
Trueface was originally founded in 2013 as Chui, a manufacturer of the world’s first ever smart doorbell with face recognition.
After nearly four years of creating custom hardware and building out the underlying facial recognition technology, Chui launched its first access control product, the Chui Doorbell.
Shortly after launch, we began to see tremendous value in the software powering each doorbell as well as the opportunity to leverage the software across a variety of industries.
Immediately thereafter, the team began working on a version of the software that could be licensed to businesses and in 2017, the company launched a software as a service product and Trueface was born.
3. What are the market sectors in which Trueface is developed?
Trueface has a strong presence in the government space, gaming/casino sector, financial services, healthcare, and digital identity space.
We view our solution as solving a simple problem of ensuring the person that is trying to gain access to a website, service or physical location is who they say they are.
4. What are your most innovative products or services?
We strive to be at the cutting edge for everything that we put into production.
Our face recognition technology has been ranked in the top 3 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for speed and accuracy.
We offer products in three categories, all of which run entirely on client infrastructure to ensure data privacy.
- Developer Solutions – Trueface’s SDK and dockerized API’s empower technical teams to build computer vision capabilities into their own products.
- Access Control – increases environmental security by enabling clients to admit their employees and guests with single-factor or multifactor contactless verification.
- Biosecurity – equips businesses to reopen. Remain open and rebuild customer confidence by enabling frictionless temperature and mask detection, density and social distance monitoring.
5. How does your system find a face among a thousand just in a few seconds?
We’ve benchmarked the speed in which we can identify someone across a variety of hardware/computing platforms.
If we have control over the hardware we can achieve 1 billion faces per second, effectively scanning the population of the world in under 10 seconds.
6. What is the distinctive feature of the Trueface’s services?
Our ethical and responsible approach to the market. Trueface is driven by its mission to deliver computer vision solutions that benefit all of society.
Trueface is one of the only companies to publish its ethnicity and bias reports and encourage the industry to be more transparent about limitations.
7. What makes Truceface attractive to the eyes of the investors?
Trueface is an extremely fast growing company with very little overhead and very high margins.
Trueface last raised a seed round of $3.7M in May of 2019.
8. What kind of consequences have created the current privacy regulations on your products?
We are in compliance with a lot of the global privacy regulations because we do not host any of our technology on our own infrastructure.
All of our solutions are locally hosted by clients thus we never have access to any of their data, ever.
In addition we offer tools like auto-redaction which allows clients to auto-blur faces if necessary.
9. How can your products guarantee the privacy of a person?
Our products run entirely on client infrastructure meaning that no information is ever sent back to Trueface or is accessible by Trueface.
In addition to our technology running in a local client environment, the Trueface software does not need to store images – the way the technology works the software creates a ‘face template’ which is a numerical representation of the face that it then uses as a reference match.
10. How do the privacy regulations of the different markets you operate in affect the sale of your products?
Privacy has always been at the forefront of our design and architecture.
Our technology can be used in compliance with GDPR and CCPA.
We provide our clients with best use guidelines and help them develop their privacy strategy to ensure the technology is being used the way it was designed to be.
11. How do you develop a successful relationship with possible investors?
We raised a $3.7M Seed round of funding from Lavrock Ventures and Scout Ventures in May of 2019.
It was really important for us that we found investors who understood our desire to enter the government space and understood the timeline to engage in meaningful commercial contracts.
We spent years developing relationships with investors and ultimately found the right venture capital funds to work with through persistence and networking.
12. If you could give just one piece of advice to an aspiring startup founder, what would it be?
The internet is an extremely powerful ‘book’ in which you can absorb any knowledge that you please.
Persistence and dedication through the tough times will make all the difference in your success.
We want to thak Mr. Shaun Moore for joning us on our website. Trueface proved itself to be a succesful startup, that managed to build a strong presence on a vast market like biosecurity.
It was very interesting to hear from him about all his tips to start an international business.
If you were interested in this interview, also discover our interview with Giovanni Fiengo, Founder of Kineton in our blog!
