The face recognition startup that Jack Ma wants to use for selfie payments just got $25M in funding

Face++, a face recognition tech startup from Beijing, today announced it raised an additional US$25 million as part of its series B round that began in November last year (h/t to 36kr). The fresh funding brings the company’s series B to a total of US$47 million. Innovation Works and Ignition Partners contributed to the initial funding, while the more recent investors have not yet been disclosed.

Face++ makes a cloud-based API and an SDK so developers can incorporate face recognition into their own apps. The startup tells Tech in Asia it has over 30,000 developers using its technology. When Tech in Asia first spoke to the company in November 2013, it already claimed to be the most popular such technology in China, used by over 10,000 developers and several large firms including the country’s biggest dating site, Jiayuan. Users could upload a photo of someone they thought was beautiful, and Jiayuan would use Face++ to find a match on the site with a similar face.

More recently, Face++ was paraded in front of an audience at Cebit by none other than Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Ma demonstrated face recognition-enabled mobile payments, in which the user’s face is substituted for a password to buy something online. While this technology doesn’t yet exist for consumers, it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented for real.

Face++’s solution doesn’t require any special sort of equipment, just the average smartphone camera will do. Whereas the run-of-the-mill face recognition tool analyzes five points – eyes, nose, and the corners of the mouth – Face++ analyzes 83 points.

Besides password replacement and payments, Face++ is currently looking into intelligent video analysis, retail applications, and security.