Face ID, Megvii’s online identity authentication platform, is one way Face++ is being integrated into the Internet’s infrastructure. (Face ID’s face-comparison API interface utilizes Face++ technology.) Nearly 90 percent of China’s roughly 200 top Internet companies use Face ID, according to Yin. It’s particularly popular with online financial services since they need to authenticate user identities remotely. (To avoid people tricking them with a photograph, these apps usually perform a “liveness test” that requires users to speak or move their heads.)

Xiaohua, which operates a virtual bank that grants loans and offers payments by installments through a mobile app called Xiaohua Qianbao (“Little Flower Wallet”), is a typical Face ID customer. Users scan their face using the app to get approved for loans and to ensure that nobody can authorize actions in the app if their phone is lost or stolen. “Xiaohua Qianbao is a purely online borrowing and lending product, so our first need is fraud prevention,” says Lingpeng Huang, a cofounder of Xiaohua. “Face recognition has eliminated the risk of fake identities.”

Megvii trains the algorithms that power Face++ and Face ID by feeding large data sets into a deep-learning engine called Brain++. (Deep learning involves feeding examples into a large, many-layered neural network, and tweaking its parameters until it accurately recognizes the desired features, such as a particular person’s face.)

To amass huge amounts of training data, Megvii let most developers use Face++ for free during the platform’s first two years of availability in 2012 and 2013. Megvii also purchases photos from data-collection companies to aid its training.

The company built Brain++ in 2015 and says having a self-developed deep-learning engine helps it train its algorithms more efficiently. “[It] translates into more competitiveness for our products,” says Jian Sun, Megvii’s chief scientist.