Hoan Ton-That

Hoan Ton-That is a Vietnamese-Australian serial entrepreneur. He is most recognized as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Clearview AI, a United States-based technology company using controversial facial recognition software.

According to the New York Times, Ton-That dropped out of college in Australia and moved to San Francisco, California in 2007. He was unsuccessful in early ventures to create social media applications after the advent of Apple's iPhone. In 2009, he created HappyAppy and ViddyHo, a phishing application or computer worm that spammed a user's contacts. Ton-That was sought by the police when this worm spread in 2009. He then created fastforwarded.com, a similar phishing site. Ton-That later worked at AngelList.

Going back to at least 2015, Huffington Post has linked Ton-That with the "far right clique" of Mike Cernovich, Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer, and Pax Dickinson, as well as close associates of Peter Thiel, Chuck Johnson and Jeff Giesea. Ton-That and associates worked on projects to advance this political view, and Johnson posted about using face recognition to identify undocumented aliens in the United States in early 2017. This group, and others, interacted on a Slack chat set up for WeSearchr.

After attempting to become a model, Ton-That met Richard Schwartz at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in 2016. They partnered on an application with Schwartz paying server costs and basic expenses and Ton-That hiring two engineers who worked on software that could scrape images from Internet sources to cross reference on a facial recognition algorithm. It emerged from stealth mode in late 2017 and was linked to far right/alt-right supporters such as Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, Douglass Mackey, and Paul Nehlen.

Clearview AI received investments from Peter Thiel and Naval Ravikant totaling more than $200,000, which later converted into equity in the company. Upon Clearview AI receiving cease-and-desist letters from Google, YouTube, Venmo and LinkedIn, Ton-That appeared on CBS This Morning for an interview with CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett in February 2020. He has claimed that Clearview AI is exclusively a "law enforcement tool" and stated "that it's fair game to help law enforcement solve crimes using publicly-available data."