He remained in touch with the founders, and watched as PimEyes began to gain more and more media attention, most of Later diversity. In 2020, PimEyes announced a new owner, who wished to remain anonymous, and the company headquarters was moved from Poland to the Seychelles, a popular African foreign tax haven.
Mr Gobronidze said last year he had “heard” that the site’s new owner wanted to sell it. So he quickly started gathering money to make an offer, selling a beachfront mansion he inherited from his grandparents and taking out a big loan from his younger brother, Shalva Gobronidze, a software engineer at a bank. The professor will not disclose the amount he has paid.
“It is not a large amount of money as one might expect,” Mr. Gobronidze said.
In December Mr. Gobronidze set up a company, EMEARobotics, to acquire PimEyes and register it in Dubai because of the low tax rates of the United Arab Emirates. He said he’s kept most of the site’s small tech and support team, and hired a consulting firm in Belize to handle regulatory inquiries and questions.
Mr. Gobronidze leased office space to PimEyes in a tower in downtown Tbilisi. It’s still under renovation, the lighting fixtures hanging loose from the ceiling.
Tatia Dolidze, a colleague of Mr Gobronidze at the European University, described him as “curious” and “stubborn”, and said she was surprised when he told her he was buying a face search engine.
“It’s hard to imagine Giorgi as an entrepreneur,” Ms. Dolidze said by email.
Now, he’s an entrepreneur who owns a controversial company that mostly revolves around whether we have any special control over images of us that we never expected. waiting to be found this way or not. Mr. Gobronidze said facial recognition technology would be used to control people if governments and large companies had sole access to it.
