AnyVision gains war chest and validation: despite the 'controversial' framing, two marquee institutions are willing to put their names on the cap table publicly — a direct contrast with Clearview AI, whose new investors in a $30M Series B weeks later asked not to be identified.
Second-order effects
SoftBank is now building a cross-market facial-recognition portfolio, having backed Brazil's Acesso Digital ($107M with General Atlantic) alongside AnyVision — pricing power for later-stage biometric rounds shifts toward whoever can match Vision Fund-scale checks.
Third-order effects
The pattern suggests reputational risk is migrating downstream: top-tier capital will fund controversial surveillance AI openly, leaving ethics exposure to buyers and regulators rather than investors — and concentrating the sector's scale-up capacity in a handful of mega-backed players.
The trend: Controversial surveillance-AI startups are graduating into nine-figure institutional rounds rather than being starved of capital, with SoftBank emerging as the sector's most active financier.
“The startup was the subject of a report in 2019 that alleged that its technology was being quietly used by the Israeli government to run surveillance on Palestinians in the West Bank” https://twitter.com/...
Companies like AnyVision would love to see facial recognition “regulations” so that they can continue selling this invasive, racist, dangerous software to anyone who will buy it while washing their hands of the results by saying “well they complied with all the laws” Ban it. http…
“'Overall, we had over 164,000 detections the last 7 days running the pilot. We were able to detect students on multiple cameras and even detected one student 1100 times!' Taylor May, then a regional sales manager for AnyVision, said in an email” https://themarkup.org/...
NEW: We reviewed hundreds of exchanges between a Texas school district and a facial recognition firm it bought software from. The software detected faces more than 164,000 times during the school's weeklong pilot period. https://themarkup.org/...
New: Facial recognition firm AnyVision boasts hundreds of customers, including in schools, stores like Macy's, airports and stadiums. We reviewed public records, including a 2019 version of its user guide, which showed just how much people are tracked: https://themarkup.org/...