SenseTime – A Chinese AI Unicorn That Came Up With Some Of The World’s Most Advanced Technologies.
Based in Hong Kong, SenseTime is known as the world’s most valuable AI (artificial intelligence) company. It was founded in 2014 and within 7 years it has gained unicorn status and developed some of the advanced AI algorithms. A computer science professor, Tang Xiao’ou, and a computer scientist, Xu Li co-founded the company with others. It started as an academic project and by 2019 its valuation became $4.5 billion. It has landed some of the biggest conglomerates as its clients including Alibaba, Honda, Qualcomm, and Weibo.
About The SenseTime
It is almost hard to believe that a young seven-year-old company develops such advanced Ai-based technologies that it is one of the finest in the world. The company develops AI technology including image and facial recognition, object detection, medical image analysis, video analysis, remote sensing, etc. Its products are used in several different industries from entertainment to healthcare.
When the company was founded in 2014, it developed DeepID, a facial recognition algorithm that was the first of its kind to detect accuracy better than human eyes. SenseTime is working with the Chinese government on a project to make the country economically autonomous by 2025. Currently, SenseTime is a privately-held company.
Early History
In October 2014, Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li co-founded SenseTime and in the founded year it unveiled the best algorithm for better detection accuracy than human eyes. This algorithm is called DeepID and it is even ahead of Facebook. The company also presented and published several papers on computer vision and they were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Within one year of its establishment, a total of 9 papers were accepted. In 2016, the company enrolled itself in the ImagineNet competition and it bagged the first price in several fields including object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis. The number of papers accepted in the CVPR Conference also rose to 16 by the end of the year.
Success Of SenseTime
In 2017, SenseTime broke all of the records of past company’s in the AI industry in terms of the highest rounds of financing. The number of publications kept on increasing and by the year-end, it surpassed both Google and Facebook with 43 publications. It was in the same year that SenseTime raised $410 million in the Series B funding. SenseTime started collaborating with several companies and government bodies of China. For example, in October 2017 it started a joint venture with Qualcomm followed by collaborating with Shanghai Municipal Government, and Honda by the end of the year.
In 2018, the company declared a collaboration with MIT for advanced research in the field of AI but after a couple of years, the program was canceled by MIT. In April 2018, a non-profit AI lab called HKAI Lab was founded to make Hong Kong a global AI hub. SenseTime founded this lab jointly with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. SenseTime was also named as China’s National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision in September 2018.
Recent Days
Since 2014, SenseTime has tried to develop more advanced AI technologies that are equally focused on the research and development side of the company apart from the business part. In 2019, it became the first company in the world to join MIT’s Quest for Intelligence Campaign. The company is planning to go public as it filed IPO this year on the Hong Kong exchange. Though the company has given the world’s largest computer vision model, the profit curve is not very impressive. SenseTime heavily invests in R&D (60% of funding) and plans to expand to more and more industries both in domestic and overseas countries.
About The Founders
Tang Xiao’ou, apart from being the co-founder of SenseTime is also an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an alumnus of MIT and worked at Microsoft Research Area for four years. In 2009, he received the best paper award at CVPR Conference.
Xu Li is the co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has published more than 50 academic works in the field of computer vision and won many awards.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more