NtechLab founders Artyom Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov told Reuters that they left the company due to disagreements with management and investors, the main of which was connected with the continuation of work in Russia. According to them, they insisted that the company should leave the country and take out all the employees.
“The majority of shareholders supported the management, so we had no other choice but to leave the company,” Kukharenko said. One of the founders left NtechLab back in December 2021, and the second left in March 2022. They said that they began to discuss the need to curtail all projects in Russia after the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in August 2020. “It became clear that the country was moving towards disaster, although no one could have imagined that the country would start a war,” Kukharenko said.
NtechLab, responding to a request from Reuters, said that the decision to stay in Russia was made unanimously by the company's board of directors, and no one, including Kukharenko and Kabakov, exercised the right of veto. The founders, however, claim that the issue was never put to a vote.
According to Reuters, the comments of the founders of NtechLab were a reaction to the publication of the agency on March 28, which described how Russian security forces use facial recognition to search for and detain protesters and opposition figures. Among the algorithms underlying this system was FindFace, developed by NtechLab.
Since 2018, one of the owners of NtechLab has been the Russian state corporation Rostec. The face recognition system developed by the company was first launched in Moscow, and then in 10 more Russian cities.
In 2022, the Anti-Corruption Foundation added Kukharenko and Kabakov to its “list of corrupt officials and warmongers” and then removed them from it because they both left Russia and condemned the invasion of Ukraine. In October, however, FBK changed its mind and returned the founders of NtechLab to the list, explaining that “the repentance of Kabakov and Kukharenko was not public enough, and the information they provided was incomparable in importance with their contribution to building a police state.”
