The CEO of Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that sparked a 2020 controversy over its harvesting billions of social media images from the internet without users’ consent, has resigned, the company confirmed to Forbes.
Clearview co-founder Hoan Ton-That stepped back as CEO in December and took on the role of president. Then, on Friday, following a Forbes inquiry, he told the company he was resigning, noting he was leaving to start the “next chapter of my life.” In a statement to Forbes, Ton-That said he would continue serving as a board member.
Early investor and board member Hal Lambert took over as co-CEO in December, alongside cofounder Richard Schwartz, who is overseeing day-to-day operations, Lambert told Forbes in an interview. A former fundraiser for President Trump, Lambert said that he had stepped in to help Clearview “with the new administration,” adding, “There’s some opportunities there. I’m going to be helping with that effort.”
During Trump’s first administration, officials pushed to expand biometric surveillance, particularly at the border where they argued it could be used to enforce immigration laws. Given the second administration’s “Make America Safe Again” priorities and Trump’s pledge to oversee “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Lambert sees a big opportunity for Clearview. “The policy is, we want to keep America safe, and technology is a way to do it,” he said. “Under the Trump administration, we would hope to grow more than we were able to under the Biden administration…We’re talking to the [Pentagon], we’re talking to Homeland Security. There are a number of different agencies we’re in active dialogue with.”
Ton-That has long been the public face of the Clearview and its facial recognition tool. Built on a database of billions of photos scraped from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other websites, the tool could be used to reveal just about anyone’s true identity from a surveillance image in a matter of seconds. The tool was widely tested — often without oversight or public disclosure — by the Department of Justice, retailers like Best Buy and Macy’s, and law enforcement and government-affiliated agencies in dozens of countries, raising concerns that facial recognition could be deployed at a mass scale.
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After overseeing its contentious public debut in 2020, Ton-That and the company faced an avalanche of lawsuits from civil rights groups, who claimed it violated the privacy rights of people whose faces it had scraped from the internet. It reached a settlement in 2022 in Illinois, which still allowed the company to work with government agencies, and settled another group of lawsuits last year.
Clearview, which claims a database of 60 billion images, subsequently committed to selling only to government agencies, primarily local law enforcement. The company has said its technology has been used to help solve cases involving terrorism, homicide, human trafficking, and child predation. And it secured contracts with the Ukrainian government to provide facial recognition services to help identify fallen soldiers. “This could be a billion-plus or $2 billion annual recurring revenue company,” Ton-That told one publication in August.
But it was never able to develop a robust business selling to federal agencies under the Biden administration, which was concerned about the impact facial recognition might have on civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy were it to be embraced by the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Clearview’s head of sales to the Pentagon and intelligence community left in December.
Clearview had $16 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Lambert; Much of this was generated by contracts with local law enforcement agencies. He hopes Clearview, which isn’t profitable, will triple its revenue this year. The company considered raising debt financing last year, but opted against it, and now plans to raise equity this year. It last raised funding in 2021, a $30 million series B funding round that valued the company at $130 million. Other early investors include Peter Thiel and Naval Ravikant.
“The last four years, it’s been very difficult on the federal side,” Lambert said. “We’ve had lawsuits and all the stuff that’s going on that’s really designed to hamper things and slow things down. So I think a lot of that is behind us.”
