Videntifier – an Icelandic developer of leading visual search and identification solutions – has announced the opening of its R&D centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. This will be the company’s first branch in mainland Europe. Videntifier is seeking to relocate several people from Reykjavik, as well as to hire a number of highly skilled developers locally.
Stemming from previous collaboration between Icelandic and French research institutions, Videntifier was founded in Reykjavik by three graduate students in 2008. The company offers two unique services: one that seamlessly compares visual content from a pool of millions of images and videos, and another that identifies pictures taken by the same camera device. The company’s clients vary from content owners willing to protect their intellectual property to law enforcement organizations investigating terrorism and child sexual exploitation cases, Interpol being the most prominent example.
As Videntifier’s team handles cutting-edge technology, finding adequate talent has always been a challenge. Nevertheless, the company grew slowly but steadily, and now employs a dozen specialists. In 2013, a skilled Lithuanian developer joined the team and has been with the company ever since. According to Herwig Lejsek, Videntifier’s founder and CEO, this first “Lithuanian connection” and the support received from Invest Lithuania were the reason behind choosing Vilnius.
“We see Lithuania as a place that can help us build a multicultural and highly specialized team that works together based on mutual understanding and respect. It is very possible that in a couple of years, Vilnius will be Videntifier’s main R&D centre,” Herwig believes. “We also hope to work closely with local universities by partnering with their research labs and offer young scientists a chance to intern and learn about our technologies during their master and PhD studies.”
In their setup phase, the company plans to transfer three people from Iceland and hire up to five people until the end of 2018. Videntifier is looking for highly-skilled developers who can tackle challenging tasks by using algorithm conversion, computer vision and high-dimensional indexing knowledge. The company intends to hire around 20 people in the following few years.
According to Mantas Katinas, Managing Director at Invest Lithuania, Videntifier’s case serves as a reminder that top-notch talents are a trump card when it comes to attracting high-tech companies.
“It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes the entire country to prepare world-class developers. Companies from places as distant as Singapore and Iceland choose Lithuania because talent is what drives their businesses further. And Lithuania is deeply interested in nurturing talents in future-oriented fields like computer vision, virtual reality, machine learning, AI, and robotics,” Mantas Katinas says.
Videntifier Technologies, commonly known as Videntifier, is an Icelandic company specializing in large-scale video, image and camera identification, supplying high-tech software to the largest law enforcement and copyright protection agencies in the world. As of today, Videntifier’s solutions have been deployed to many major law enforcement organizations, including the US National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, the US Department of Homeland Security, the Swedish National Police, EUROPOL, the UK Home Office, the Korean National Police and the Indian Home Office. In February 2018, Videntifier signed a deal with one of the top 5 Internet companies in the USA for the use of its visual search and identification solutions.
