Facial recognition company start up Face.com has an accumulated fund of $4.3 million, from a line up of investors led by Rhodium. Along with Rhodium is Yandex, the operator of Russia’s largest search engine, and some private investors as well. The news was confirmed by a Yandex representative after it was first reported by TheMarker.  From Face.com founder and CEO Gil Hirsh:

“Face.com has indeed accepted a round of funding. The total amount is $4.3M USD, and the participants included Rhodium, Yandex, and current private investors. We’re going to use the money to boost our development team, hire some new and talented people, and build out additional infrastructure to support our facial recognition platform.

We’ve had thousands of developers sign up to join our platform and get access to our facial recognition API’s, and we want to support those developers and provide great technology. We’re excited and very proud to have the support from our investors.”

Yandex has not specified the amount or details of this venture but only said they are working with Face.com on a “large joint project.”

Face.com was founded in 2007 whose facial recognition technology which includes Phototagger and Photo Finder is used by Facebook. The company announced last May that it helped users scan over 7 billion photos and launched a developer community and open API providing third-party devs access to their core facial technology.

The API has been a major area of focus of the company this year, particularly around app development with its technology behind it.  Image recogntion in general is growing in interest as it improves its technology, with Apple and Google making key acquisitions to improve search methodology and more.