The founders of NtechLab, Alexander Kabakov and Artem Kukharenko, who left due to the organization's plans to continue working on a face recognition system in Russia, remained the company's shareholders. This is reported by the «Agency».
According to the publication, both entrepreneurs still own shares in the company, this is evidenced by extracts from the Cypriot register of legal entities. According to the Agency, shares in N-Tech.Lab LTD are owned by the Cypriot Revardim Investments Limited, owned by Kukharenko, and Rainfall Global Limited, associated with Kabakov.
On March 30, both men announced that they had finally quit NtechLab due to disagreements with management and investors over projects in Russia. According to Kukharenko and Kabakov, they wanted the company to stop working in Russia and take employees out of the country, but the management did not agree with these plans. In the summer of 2022, CNews, citing its sources, wrote that Kabakov and Kukharenko had left the company's management.
On March 28, Reuters published an investigation into how the Russian authorities use facial recognition systems to suppress protests, including anti-war ones. Among the companies that developed software solutions for the Russian authorities was NtechLab.
One of the founders of the company left Russia in December 2021, the other in March 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
NtechLab is a technology partner of Rostec and the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT). The company develops products for face recognition, silhouettes and images of people, which are later used by the authorities to search for suspects.
Connecting cameras in Moscow entrances, public places and the metro to the face recognition system began in 2017. Three years later, NtechLab launched pilot projects to create a Safe City system in ten other Russian cities. The authorities began to actively use search by face during the “self-isolation regime” due to the coronavirus and protests in support of politician Alexei Navalny.
Meduza notes that after the outbreak of the war, FBK added Kabakov and Kukharenko to its “list of corrupt officials and warmongers,” but after they passed information about NtechLab to Navalny’s associates, they were removed from the list. This decision was explained by the fact that the founders of the company left Russia and condemned the invasion of Ukraine. Already in October 2022, the FBK returned Kukharenko and Kabakov to the list, as their “repentance was not public enough, and the information they provided was incomparable in importance with their contribution to building a police state.”
Business Insider wrote, that more than 1.1 thousand companies and organizations from 60 countries, including the USA, Canada, Mexico and China, received permission to use FindFace face recognition technology from NtechLab. The publication claimed that NtechLab's clients are not only Russian agencies, such as the FSB and the Federal Penitentiary Service, but also foreign government agencies — Interpol, the Brazilian Federal Police, the Royal Thai Army and at least 20 Ukrainian organizations.