New app claims it can identify venture capitalists using facial recognition

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Investors weren’t interested in Tosh Velaga’s idea when he started pitching it this summer. Facial recognition software for retail stores to catch shoplifters made sense in theory, but people were skeptical it would work. So Velaga and his co-founder Igor Nefedov did what entrepreneurs do best: they pivoted.

“We were like, ‘what if we repurposed this for something stupid, like AI that could detect the faces of investors?’” Velaga remembers.

This month, the resulting project finally made it onto the Play Store. It’s called AngelFace, an Android app that lets users identify whether someone is a venture capitalist by capturing a quick photo of their face. According to Velaga, “You just hold your phone up to someone’s face for a second,...

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