For Internet giants, laying out AI is to lay out the future. The "funding owner" Alibaba's layout and strategic investment in AI are definitely a big deal. Judging from its investment layout in the past two or two years, from Cambrian and Shenjian Technology, the top companies in the field of AI chips, to unicorns SenseTime and Megvii Technology in the field of computer vision, Alibaba has already captured all of them and has taken over the AI game.
Alibaba has never been stingy in investing in the field of artificial intelligence technology.
On October 31, Megvii Technology announced that it had completed a USD D round of financing of 460 million US dollars, with investors including Ant Financial, China-Russia Investment Fund and South Korea's Xianjing Group. This financing amount set a new record for the highest single financing in the field of artificial intelligence in the world. After this round of financing, Megvii Technology will be valued at least US$1 billion. As early as 2014, Megvii Technology received strategic investment from Ant Financial. Earlier in August, AI chip company Cambrian completed a US$100 million A round financing, jointly invested by Guotou Ventures, Alibaba Ventures, Lenovo Ventures, Guoke Investments, Zhongke Turing, Yuanhe Origin and Yonghua Investment.
After completing its A-round financing, Cambrian became the first unicorn startup in the field of AI chips in the world. Now, SenseTime, which has not yet been confirmed to have investment, has also been confirmed to be in the C round of financing, with a valuation of over US$3 billion after financing. In the last round of financing, SenseTime set a record for single financing in the world with a financing of US$410 million, and ranked among the AI unicorns.
These AI companies invested by Alibaba can see some common features, that is, typical technology-driven, and most of the members of the entrepreneurial team are technically born and have a strong AI technology background. Taking SenseTime as an example, the company's AI talents are a key value point that investors value. Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime Technology, told All-Weather Technology that most people who are proficient in deep learning have already studied PHD (generally refer to research-based doctoral degrees). China currently has only one or two hundred people in this regard, while SenseTime has attracted 120 people, "and has reserved all the people in this regard before."
In 2014, SenseTime went to ImageNet, an authoritative competition in the field of artificial intelligence for the first time. It won the world runner-up with a score of 40.7% in the large-scale object detection competition, defeating Microsoft, Baidu and other companies, second only to Google. In 2016, the artificial intelligence team participated by SenseTime was selected into the world's top ten artificial intelligence pioneer laboratories together with famous universities such as MIT and Stanford. An investor of SenseTime Technology also explained to All-weather Technology, "Its high valuation is reasonable, after all, investors will also consider it carefully. On the one hand, the AI battle is a competition between talents and data. When no one has received comprehensive market verification, talent and data are important considerations."
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