Alcatraz AI to Expand Its Teams in the Silicon Valley and in Sofia
Alcatraz AI is relocating its teams from the Silicon Valley and Sofia offices to new, bigger spaces to welcome a growing international team and prepare for the launch of their new product for 3D facial recognition Alcatraz Rock.
The new office in the U.S. is in Redwood City, California, where a team of more than 50 experts will join efforts on scientific research and development. In Sofia, the team will have 6,500 square feet at its disposal and will serve as the company’s European center.
“As we move into mass production, the Alcatraz team is growing as well and so it was important for us to expand our office space both in Silicon Valley where we started and in our Sofia, Bulgaria location as well,” Alcatraz Founder and CEO Vince Gaydarzhiev said in an official statement, cited by BiometricUpdate.com – a leading media in the field of biometrics.
According to Vins Gaydarzhiev, the new product Alcatraz Rock is attracting a lot of attention because it offers biometric authentication without the need for touchpoints (which is now required for access control through fingerprint scanners, access control badges, turnstiles, and others). Alcatraz Rock works through 3D Facial Authentication and the COVID-19 pandemic imposed on the companies to look for new solutions for working spaces that don’t require physical touch, in ensuring secure access to the working space as well.
The company presented the new platform in February 2020, at an exhibition in Las Vegas. Developed by the same Apple engineers involved in the FaceID project, the product comes in response to the demand for new face recognition applications, which have become very popular with smartphones. The access control and security market are among the areas in which the technology finds a broad field for new applications.
In addition to pure facial recognition, Alcatraz Rock 3D also detects actions such as tailgating and piggybacking by recognizing the attempt and immediately alerting on a potentially criminal act. The solution also uses artificial intelligence and detects the behavior of people who do not naturally belong to a given environment or behave suspiciously.
Alcatraz was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 2016, and only a year later opened an office in Sofia. From the very beginning, the Bulgarian engineering team has been involved in the development of the company’s products. There are nearly 20 employees here, and the company is currently recruiting more specialists for four positions.
