In this week’s episode, I speak with Mujadad Naeem, Chief Executive Officer of Facia.
Facia is a biometrics startup based in London. Their products include face search, face matching, age verification, liveness detection and iris recognition. Mujadad is the driving force behind Facia. Prior to founding Facia, he was a Digital Marketing Executive at Confiz.
We discuss the origin story of his company and how their solutions are implemented in organizations around the world within the fintech, banking, crypto, online gambling and matchmaking industries.
RESOURCES:
Connecting with Mujadad Naeem
Mujadad Naeem’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mujadad2296/
Facia’s website: https://facia.ai/
Companies & Resources Discussed
Facia is one of the leading international deepfake prevention and detection solution providers, with services extending to over 190 countries across the globe. Its products range from 3D liveness detection solutions, to age estimation and iris recognition.
Let's Face It is a new video podcast from Facia focused on identity security and the future of authentication.
Programmer Force is Pakistan’s first AI-based tech company committed to developing AI-powered solutions that empower governments and businesses to fast-track the digital-first movement.
Confiz is a technology pioneer empowering startups, large enterprises, and Fortune 100 clients worldwide to harness the power of innovation, build resilience, and become agile in the ever-changing world.
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Steve Craig: Welcome to the PEAK IDV EXECUTIVE SERIES video podcast, where I speak with executives, leaders, founders, and change makers in the digital identity space. I'm your host, Steve Craig, Founder and Chief Enablement Officer of PEAK IDV. For our audience, this is a video first series. So if you're enjoying the audio version, please check out the full video recording on executiveseries.peakidv.com, where you can watch this full episode. You can read the transcript and you can access any of the resources or links from today's discussion. In this week's episode, I'm pleased to speak with Mujadad Naeem, Chief Executive Officer of Facia.
Founded in 2022, Facia aims to verify 8 billion faces globally. Their products include face search, face matching, age verification, liveness detection, and iris recognition. Their solutions are implemented in organizations around the world within fintech, banking, crypto, online gambling, and matchmaking industries. Mujadad is the driving force behind Facia. Prior to founding the company, he was a digital marketing executive at Confiz, and he earned his B.A. and M.B.A. from Lahore School of Economics in Pakistan. Welcome, Mujadad. Thank you for making the time to be on the podcast.
Mujadad Naeem: Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me.
Steve: Let's get started. What's your typical Facia elevator pitch when you're meeting new people and you're sharing about what your company does?
Mujadad: Okay, Facia is one of the world's fastest face authentication software. We are in a mission to verify 8 billion people. That means anyone from anywhere in the world.
Steve: What led you to start the company? Like what's your startup story? How did you get involved in facial biometrics?
Mujadad: Actually, it's a bittersweet story. It's a-- like a few years ago, my mom was traveling on a ride hailing app-- don't want to name, it's a huge-- have globally presence. My-- she was traveling in Lahore to a remote location. I called her on the cell phone, but I couldn't answer it. There was some network issue. So I called the app and asked them to locate her and see if she's all right.
I asked them and they called the driver of the ride hailing app. And to my shock, someone else was driving that cab, whether it be some driver, original driver's friend or someone else, but I was really shocked. I was really scared for my mother. I was like-- it was a really scary moment for me. Luckily she came home alright. I discussed the same situation with my partner, my CTO that this has happened. And as a-- as an entrepreneur, as a problem solver, we have always focused on finding a solution to a problem. So we came up with this facial software that authenticates that driver randomly, so that that ride hailing app could resolve that.
And no one else faces the same situation. When we went into the market, to our shocker, that the use cases are huge. It's not just ride hailing or P2P app. It is used in retail, banking, matchmaking, any industry, you name it.
Steve: What a scary situation. I think people don't often realize how easy it is in those hailing services for another individual to come in and take the place of that driver, either because of fraud or because maybe the person who normally has that account can't drive that day.
I'm interested in your personal background. So you encountered that situation, you immediately decided, “hey, I want to solve this problem.” Where did you focus your early career? Like what, what's your-- what's your personal origin story?
Mujadad: As a core expertise, I am-- I'm a digital marketer. I did my MBA in marketing and marketing was-- like my keen interest is in marketing. Whenever I'm in my-- in my free time, I just study marketing and see what strategies people are using all over the globe. That has been my nature; however, as an entrepreneur, I am a problem solver. I think that that problem solving attitude drives me towards Facia and to solving a global problem of identity theft.
Steve: Well, I understand you raised-- was at 1.2 million last summer for sales marketing, go-to-market. Can you share more about that experience and how you rallied investors and your fundraising to get the company off the ground?
Mujadad: Fundraising is a means to an end. You receive-- you get the funds to help develop a business goal, a business, achieve a business objective. Fundraising can be often be difficult as one loses control over the company. Then there are certain growth KPIs that are required to meet. However, my experience with Programmer Force has been splendid. I had the freedom to maneuver my company however I wanted. Although Facia grew exponentially and, but there was not any pressure from the investor side. They have been mentoring me and they have been guiding me throughout the course of Facia. And it has been one of the best experience of my life.
Steve: Let's talk more about Facia. In the intro, I talked about the areas that you focus in predominantly around the face. What would you say are the core pillars of your offering today?
Mujadad: When we started Facia, our vision was to build trust globally. A vision has to be ambitious, has to cover global aspects. However, our mission-- since we are a B2B company, our mission was to ensure trusted users, verified users for businesses digitally and within seconds. That's the idea behind it. In terms of face-- Facia's value generation, we generate value in terms of a smooth user experience while maintaining high level of accuracy.
Steve: And the pieces of your stack, are these software development kits? Is this a SaaS service, is this on-prem? Can you share more about those specific components that you use to create that trust?
Mujadad: When we started with this, we offered it as a SaaS service, but we have refined the product, did more development into technology, into our expertise as well. Now we offer SaaS, we offer API integration, we have our own SDK, mobile apps as well, available to these banking-- any industry that they want to incorporate.
Steve: Facia participated in the recent PEAK IDV Demo Day. Thank you for being involved in that. I met one of your team members who is based in Pakistan, who is running marketing. I'm curious about where the rest of your team members are. Like where, where is your global team based and what markets and industries are you focused in?
Mujadad: It's a global world. We are headquartered in UK. We have people all over the world. My VP is from Canada, we have multiple marketing executives in Croatia, in Estonia. We have our sales team in Italy, Singapore. A couple of our team members are in UAE and you have already mentioned we are from Pakistan as well.
Steve: And the industries that you focus in, I mentioned fintech and crypto and some of the others, where would you say you've been the most successful or where you are most dominant currently with your products?
Mujadad: We have successful use cases for all industries that we have listed, on us-- on our website. For instance, we have talked to matchmaking sites. We have ride hailing apps as a customer. We have a bank as a customer. We have identity management service providers as customers as well. I would say banks and identity management services, KYC providers. These are the most ideal and most educated audience and most easiest for us to sell.
Steve: There are a lot of companies in the digital identity space that offer face biometric services. I've interviewed a few in the podcast series. They offer liveness, detection, face recognition. What would you say sets you apart from some of the other companies in the space? Like what, what are your unique selling points and differentiators?
Mujadad: The beauty of Facia lies in its accuracy, in its speed and the smooth end user experience. We have find a very sweet spot in terms of ensuring the accuracy. For instance, there's no false acceptance rate, very smooth end user experience. They don't have to do much of the activities, to authenticate them. And we are fast; we verify under one second. That's our goal. That has always been our goal, to achieve high speed.
Steve: I was looking into your website a bit and I really enjoy all the educational content that you put on it. One section was really insightful, which was the various types of injection attacks that you focus on solving. And I think the list was over 50, 56 plus. What are some of the top attacks that you're seeing in the field? Like of that 56, like what are the ones that are most common that are coming up?
Mujadad: I think deepfakes and video replay attacks. One of the-- so major attacks-- major types of attack that we defend. Most common deepfakes has been very easy. We can create a realistic deepfakes in just matter of seconds. And all you need is an internet connection and a browser; that's it. And hyper realistic deepfakes can be created. So these are, deepfakes is one of the emerging threats and it is sort of-- the hype is real. It's not a thing of the future. It is here.
Steve: So you're seeing fraudsters deploying these techniques, at scale? Would you say-- like, like how predominant are they across all of the various-- you've got 56 plus, would you say those have increased in their usage?
Mujadad: I think deepfakes are the most predominant. Like I could literally give you a ton of examples of-- one of the huge example was that recently a Hong Kong bank was literally robbed of $25 million through a deepfake video call with a CFO. Then the cases of Donald Trump, then the cases of Ukraine president during the Ukraine, Russia war. So the deepfakes come literally every second there's a deepfake coming up.
Steve: One of the parts of your website talks about your lab where you're testing some of these. What would you say are the most challenging to detect? Like, what were, if you really had to double down in R&D and focus to be able to solve these presentation attacks?
Mujadad: Yeah, when we're building the lab, lab has to be robust. It has to cover all the different types of attacks. But one of the most difficult ones were 3D masks. These are hyper realistic masks that you see in the movies. Often Tom Cruise wears these 3D masks.
Then there's video replay attacks. You get a hyper realistic screen, 4K, 8K screen and a video of the person that is very hard to detect by a camera. Then there's video manipulation attacks and of course deepfake attacks.
Steve: When you look at your customer base and you mentioned you've got some in banks and you've got matchmaking services across the board globally. Are there any particular use cases or customer implementations that come to mind that are really compelling case studies for you? Any particular scenarios that you can speak to for deployment of your product?
Mujadad: Yeah, some of them as we have already discussed, like onboarding is one of the use cases. Verifying payments, payment gateway. But one unique instance was that-- you see these e-scooters all across Europe, all across MENA, Middle East, that are available for rental. People could just rent and pay for them through a QR code and use it throughout the city. Now one of the rental companies came to us, they wanted to remove the process and reduce the process as much as they can. Now, currently the users pick the bike, scan this QR, paid through their own app, and then the-- they have to wait a few minutes to-- before they can hop on the scooter. This causes a lot of friction for the user.
So the company wanted a single step. So what we did is that we added a camera to the scooter. Whenever someone hops on, if they have an account already with the company, their account is automatically charged and the ride is instantly activated. Thus reducing time, save, instantly verifying users and smoothing the overall user experience.
Now, this was one of the fun activities that we did. We didn't thought of the use case like this, the company was astonished with the requirement and we did the job.
Steve: That's fascinating. Did they enable those-- were they already enabled for internet connectivity? Is that, you know, they were able to put the camera feed through?
Mujadad: Yeah, the bikes had the-- they had their own API calls, for which the QR they were using. So we replaced that API calls with our Facia API's, that authenticate the user with camera.
Steve: Globally, there are a lot of scenarios where internet connectivity isn't strong, or perhaps the device or handset can't handle uploads of videos or even high resolution pictures. Has your technology been deployed in an edge scenario where it runs locally on whatever application or hardware to be able to do that matching? Or is it always requiring an API call out?
Mujadad: It depends upon the use case, what kind of worker uses, the company wants. We do offer SDKs. We do offer on-prem solution as well. So, but the limitation of on-prem is that then you have to be connected to the server. One way or another, you have to call that API. You have to verify. It can't be an offline SDK solution within a mobile app. It has to connect it to a server where our models run to authenticate the user.
Steve: Excellent. Excellent. Well, I want to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence and machine learning. As I was browsing your website in preparation for this conversation, I found that you've got a really developed corporate responsibility statement. Can you share about how you personally think about building AI systems and what you feel you owe the market in terms of corporate responsibility?
Mujadad: Corporate responsibility is very close to my heart. Even though Facia is very in early stages, corporate responsibility is presumed to be done by SMEs and large enterprises, but I wanted to lay its foundation from the start.
Environmental initiatives, sustainable development, and humanitarian efforts. Our scale may be small, but our objective and our ambitions are high towards global sustainability was towards maintaining a diverse and inclusive environment within Facia and within its ecosystem.
Steve: That's great Mujadad. When I was reading your statements, it ended up linking me to your YouTube where you have a lot of videos for Facia. And I see recently that your company has kicked off a new series. It's called Let's Face It. There's a-- currently an episode out. I imagine you have more. What’s this new series about and can you share what type of topics it's going to cover?
Mujadad: Let's Face It is our new series that we are launching. It discussed a lot of the myths, a lot of the stigma associated with biometric authentication. A lot of educational and awareness content over cybersecurity. How do you prevent and be safe on the internet? Multiple raising awareness about deepfakes. How are they challenging individual lives, literally? Deepfakes is haunting many lives. Celebrities-- from celebrities to everyday-- our-- to children's, to-- and the problem is-- it's growing at exponential rate. So Let's Face It is a head on to that deepfake challenge.
Steve: Where I'm based in the US, there's a lot of discussion around the use of facial biometrics. It often gets conflated with facial surveillance, facial recognition versus facial tracking. As you build out the series that Let's Face It, what do you think is important for the market to know about the differences between things like surveillance and things like verification? Like, how would you set those topics apart from each other?
Mujadad: Yeah, surveillance is-- I think when comes-- when it comes to businesses, when it comes to any identity management provider in the industry, they are legally bound to have consent. We can't capture any-- we call this facial data P2 data and we can't capture any P2 data without the consent of the user.
Literally, if we do that, we will be out of business instantly. We will be under so much litigation if we do that. So that is how, leg-- legislature, how rules go-- how governance implement within our industry. We take consent before taking any information about biometrics, about the user.
That is how we are GDPR compliant, how we receive other compliances as well, and how we work. As since we have the consent of data, we tell the users that this data is stored for a certain period or it's not stored at all, depending on the client's need. That is where clients' needs come here and client has to provide that compliance with the customers.
And user surveillance on the other hand doesn't take that consent. And we might be sort of raising awareness against that as well. That no data should be captured without the consent of the user, or without informing the user that you are being recorded.
Steve: I think that's a really good delineation, and you referenced Tom Cruise earlier in his Mission Impossible with his face masks. There's another movie, Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is walking through a mall and there's these facial biometric sensors and he's getting hit with different ads that are hyper personalized. I imagine in that Minority Report world there's not a lot of consent there. Maybe it's, I don't know, implied because he's out in public, but it's really, really key.
Mujadad: Yeah, the consent is the key. We need to have policies. We have to have regulations in place to ensure the end users are safe. That's one of the main core jobs of Facia is to prevent identity theft. Identity theft is someone stealing someone else's information. And we want to protect it. We want to keep it safe. How do we do that? We do it by providing us, another layer of hyper realistic biometric authentication.
Steve: So you started the company in 2022. It's now 2024 when we're recording this episode within two years, you're off to a phenomenal start. Congratulations on your success. When you think about the business that you're building five years out, 10 years out. Where do you see Facia going and how do you get to the 8 billion faces verified mission? Like what-- how do you-- like, what's your plan forward?
Mujadad: Okay. Now we have, as I already mentioned, we have deployed a team all over the globe and we have presence in Morocco, Africa, we have MENA-- we have people in MENA, Singapore, you name it. Any region that we are, we are providing services to small enterprises to large enterprises.
So we're covering all aspects from business side. With our deepfake technology, we are helping governments and social platforms to build a safe digital environment for minorities and for the adults, both. In both ways, for instance, we are offering age verification to these platforms, we are offering deepfake detection. At the very core, once the deepfake has been viral, there's no point of blocking it or not, or restraining it; it has become viral. Everybody has seen it and it has done the damage. We need to stop that deepfake video instantly while it was being uploaded. Currently, we have the technology to detect deepfake, but to scale it on a server level, on an instant level, on a social platform, where 8 billion people use it daily and to detect it instantly, we need a bit of time and we need to do some of the R&D. And my team has been working day and night on this. And soon we'll be helping this social platform with deepfake detection instantly while they're uploading the videos.
Steve: As you were describing that, I couldn't help but think about the scenario of, people like, let's say you or I, who are on a video podcast being deepfaked. Or public figures who are on television or in movies like Tom Cruise being deepfaked and put into different scenarios. What role do you think Facia has in the next few years in content authenticity and protecting people with public personas from having their face impersonated or stolen or their voice used in ways that they wouldn't want to be associated with?
Mujadad: That is one of the object-- one of the key objectives or key goals of Facia is that we need to detect the fake instantly. When the-- whenever the video is posted on any platform, we-- and we label it, it's a deepfake. So the platform has the ability to stop it then and there without the damage that has been done to the reputation of the celebrity or any other person that is being harmed through a deepfake.
So that's the goal behind it. Wherever we aim to offer a service where-- whenever someone approaches to authenticate a video; for instance, they say “this is the video and it's a deepfake. Can you verify it?” And we'll sort of offer a free service, offer authentication, that this is actually a deepfake and people should not change their perception, change their ideas based on this video.
Steve: Yeah, it seems like it's a rapidly growing problem where perhaps you're a major public figure, like a world leader, or maybe you're just a YouTuber or a podcaster. I see so many deepfakes of Joe Rogan advertising just about every product in the world. And I don't think it's really him because he has so much content out there. So it is a-- certainly a worthy mission and I wish you much success moving forward on it.
Before we close out though, if you've seen any of the episodes of EXECUTIVE SERIES, beyond talking about the company, I'd like to go a little bit beyond the LinkedIn profile and beyond the press releases, I'm curious about what you like to do when you're not building Facia. Like what type of activities do you do in your free time?
Mujadad: Facia has been my baby for the past two years and it has taken a lot of my time and energy. However, I've tried to follow an eight hour rule, which is eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of self care. In self care, I spend time with my friends and family, do a little meditation, read a book, watch a movie. Oftentimes, I watch Friends. I'm a huge fan of Friends TV show. I watch it, oftentimes it's just running in the background. I don't have to give my full attention to it. I do some household chores while watching it. It's one of my favorite shows and it has been with me for the past 20 years.
Steve: That's great, me too. It's been, I feel like 20 years since it was airing live and I'll still watch a Friend's episode if it's on or Seinfeld too is another one that I grew up with.
Mujadad: Yeah, Seinfeld is one of the classics as well.
Steve: When you're sitting down to watch a movie, what type of genres are interesting to you? Do you go into sci-fi like we've talked?
Mujadad: Yeah, I prefer comedy. Comedy is my go-to. It's not that I don't watch-- I'm a huge fan of Marvel Universe and DC Universe both, and sci-fi as well. But, I enjoy comedy the most.
Steve: That's great. That's great. I love the recommendation of eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of self care. I find that most people, the first thing they give up is that sleep and they cut it to six hours or five hours or less, and then work tends to fill a lot of that space. So balance is really key. Thank you for sharing that.
Mujadad: Yeah, often it is-- that happens to me as well but I make sure to cover it over the weekend.
Steve: Build up that sleep debt and pay it off on the weekend. Well, that's phenomenal Mujadad.
You know, for those that are watching this episode or listening to it, what type of conversations would be interesting to you and for Facia? What would you like from the market or the outcome from where people watch this?
Mujadad: We at Facia are striving super hard, super hard to raise awareness. It's not about just doing business. It is about keeping people safe and keeping people's identity safe. That's the idea that we follow. That's the ideology that we have. And we want this-- all this work that we can get, from all the businesses, all the institutions and people like you, Steve, to help us build that awareness, build that, safe environment over the internet.
There's a lot of sites that we need to be restricting from our-- our children from. And we need a lot of identities that we need to protect. People, like the US alone, had lost over $24 billion in 2021, affecting 1.4 million people through identity theft. And these people get later on labeled into various lists-- sanctions lists as well, because their identity has been exploited and they can't travel. They can't-- people who have done nothing and someone else using their identity has labeled them to these lists and people get stuck and they get, literally harassed. Harassed would be a bad word in terms of that. The police and the law enforcement do have some grounds to stop them or to have an eye on them. But, actually these people have done nothing wrong. Their identities are stolen. And we need to stop that from happening at the first stage. It's-- it is useless to cry over spilled milk. So we need to stop it beforehand. We need to be vigilant. We need to raise awareness in terms of cybersecurity, getting the people to do the right practices. I literally did a campus semester program, for Facia, for (inaudible). Just to raise awareness within the youth, within the youngsters, on how to surf the internet safely.
Steve: You make a really important point, which is the core of why I do what I do. And that is to enable the market with education. To inspire individuals to solve these problems. And one of the traps I personally fall into, and I think it's pretty common, is because we live in this space because we breathe it, because we work in it, we often forget that 99.9 percent of the world don't know about these fraud attacks. They don't know about the risks. They don't know about the technologies to be able to solve for it. So thank you for sharing that.
When people are engaging with Facia, when they first get started, what's the best way for them to do that? Do you recommend they just download your SDKs or do you have a contact process or what's your engagement model? How should people connect with you?
Mujadad: It is easier to reach out to us. We have our demo, it's a live, you just have to visit our site and instantly you can be live, you can access the tool. And, however, if you want more dedicated support, you can email us, our email, our credentials are on our contact us page.
There's a form, you can fill out that as well. You can WhatsApp it directly. We have a WhatsApp link right on our site. When you click on chatbot, you get-- you can take you direct to the WhatsApp, direct to a support team. And our social channels are also available.
Steve: That's great. I will be sure to provide a link to each of those, to your contact form. And I think it's pretty novel that you have a WhatsApp line for people to connect with.
Mujadad, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I know you're very busy. Your startup story is very inspiring, and I wish you and Facia great success as you continue to grow and build in the market.
Mujadad: Thank you for having me, Craig. It was lovely talking to you, the pleasure was all mine.
Deepfake Defense with Mujadad Naeem