Facial Recognition in India

In 2016, Atul Rai saw a market. “The idea was to take our existing technology and build upon it and get into the local homeland security market,” said Rai, the cofounder of Staqu Technologies which began as an image recognition and data analysis firm in Gurgaon, a satellite city near New Delhi. “America had Palantir. China had SenseTime. India didn’t have a single brand like that in this space. So we wanted to be that.”

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Staqu worked with police stations to digitize their existing criminal records, and created a system that would let cops use an Android smartphone to click a picture of people they arrest, and log their demographic data, voice samples, and fingerprints into a national, searchable database. Staqu’s system is now used by police stations in eight Indian states. Rai claims that there are over a million records in the database so far, and police officers across the country are adding 1,000 more to the system per day.

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