Unlike a number of companies operating in either the cryptocurrency field or facial recognition space, Kairos Inc. is not exactly new. The artificial intelligence firm has built a specialty over the past six years in identifying faces from videos, photos and even the real-world with significant speed and accuracy.

“We can find one person in a billion in about one-third of a second, and we’re about 99.8 or 99.9 percent sure they are who we think they are,” said Brian Brackeen (pictured), founder and chief executive officer at Kairos. “It’s really all about who someone is and verifying their identity.”

Brackeen visited by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at the Polycon18 event in The Bahamas. They discussed use cases for facial recognition, a blockchain-based identity verification project, and the company’s recent security token offering.

Used by retailers and movie producers

Despite the technology’s high accuracy rate, the facial recognition solution developed by Kairos (named after the Greek term for a most opportune moment) is not designed to be a full identification spy tool. The company’s clients include retailers who track age, gender and ethnicity of store customers, and movie producers who want to read the emotions of an audience. The clients still can’t easily match a name with the image generated by Kairos.

“We’re actually one of the first anonymous facial recognition companies in the world,” Brackeen said.

The company has also been working on an identity verification project supported by the blockchain. The concept would allow a user’s anonymous, secure facial version to be used for financial transactions.

“Only this face can unlock this transaction, and I can do the same thing from the other side,” Brackeen explained. “I will only accept [digital currency] from this face. It changes everything.”

Kairos has dived fully into the cryptocurrency world by issuing its own security token with a pre-initial coin offering round already closed. “We said let’s do this the right way; let’s create a security token that’s completely SEC compliant,” said Brackeen, who saw the token sale as a good way to raise capital while still providing a benefit for investors. “You don’t lose any equity, but you gain liquidity.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Polycon18.

Photo: SiliconANGLE