Clearview AI Founded to Build Mass Facial Recognition Database

Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Australian tech entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. The company was created after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded alongside Charles C. Johnson. From its inception, Clearview AI operated in near-total secrecy, building what would become the world’s largest facial recognition database by scraping billions of photos from social media platforms and websites without consent or notification.

Early Investment and Technology

Peter Thiel was one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, providing $200,000 in seed money in 2017 that allowed the company to develop its controversial facial recognition technology. The company’s core innovation was creating an AI-powered facial recognition system that could identify individuals by matching photos against a massive database of images scraped from across the internet, including Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites.

Significance

Clearview AI’s founding marked the creation of the first truly massive-scale commercial facial recognition surveillance system. The company would ultimately scrape over 50 billion images from across the web by 2025, creating what privacy advocates described as “mass surveillance” infrastructure. Unlike previous facial recognition systems limited to government databases or controlled environments, Clearview’s approach of scraping the entire internet without consent represented a fundamental shift in surveillance capabilities, effectively ending the ability of ordinary people to maintain anonymity in public spaces. The company’s secretive operations and law enforcement partnerships would make it a central player in the expansion of authoritarian surveillance infrastructure globally.