A unicorn that was seen by Ma Yun.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “IPO that thing” (ID :ipopress), the author 筠筠.
From April to June 2018, “Song God” Jacky Cheung held four concerts in Nanchang, Zhangzhou, Jiaxing and Jinhua. Unexpectedly, in these concerts, the police arrested five fugitives, and the title of Xueyou’s elder brother was changed from “Song of God” to “Mr. Zhang, a plainclothes policeman” and “The God of the Opera”.
At that time, once the news came out, the heat was overshadowed by the concert, and many netizens ridiculed that “I sang her heartbreak, I sang him into sin”, but stunned To ridicule, to really make the god of songs “the gods catch”, in fact, it is still due to a black technology – face recognition technology.
It is also this black technology that allows the artificial intelligence “unicorn” to enter the public’s field of vision. Some media reports said that from the photos published by Jinhua Public Security official Weibo, it was learned that the public security monitoring system appeared in the operation interface of the large image platform.
However, nowadays, Etutech has changed a new way to be active again under fluorescent lights.
In recent days, it has been reported that artificial intelligence startup company Yitu Technology is seeking to list on China Science and Technology. Previously, Yitu Technology also disclosed the intention of listing to the media. However, as of now, Etu Technology responded that it attaches importance to the capital market and is also actively evaluating various opportunities. There is no clear plan at present.
However, it is curious to know that this is a magical face recognition technology that attracts a lot of attention from the outside world. What is the texture?
1
“Unicorn” that Ma Yun saw”
After AlphaGo, we started financing in March, the valuation in April can add 100 million US dollars, in May we can add another 100 million US dollars, and in June we can add another 100 million dollars. I have nothing You can do this!”
This is a piece of the original story of Zhu Xi, co-founder and CEO of Yitu Technology, in an artificial intelligence speech. He used his “Zhu Humor” to tell the company about this wave of artificial intelligence. How to be favored in the wave.
Yitu Technology was established in 2012, relying on face recognition technology to become a dark horse in the security field. Its intelligent security technology is mainly composed of artificial intelligence algorithms, high-performance computing, distributed computing and storage, and large-scale operation and maintenance. The core product is a smart security platform called “Blink”. Up to now, this security system has served nearly 30 provincial public security departments, more than 270 local public security systems and customs border checkpoints. It is currently the only company in China with a capacity of 1 billion portraits.
In 2016, according to the security market, Etutech began to announce its entry into the AI medical market and plunged into the investment ethos of “artificial intelligence + medical care”, becoming the first to adopt artificial intelligence technology. AI Unicorn Company for Medical Imaging.
For the time being, the business of Etutech has spanned many fields such as security, medical care, finance, etc., and together with Shang Tang, Yun Cong, and Defiance, it is known as the four unicorns of Chinese computer vision.
It is worth mentioning that the company’s status can not be separated from the two men behind it – the core founders Zhu Xi and Lin Chenxin.
1, Hawking “the grandson” Zhu Xi
In 1997, after entering the Northeastern University to earn a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Zhu Xi began his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2003. He studied under Professor Alan Yuille (one of the founders of the computer vision community and Professor Hawking). The smug student), known by the media as “the grandson of Hawking”, he gave the impressionLike the Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang, it is smart, confident, and a bit mad, habitually questioning the so-called authority and mainstream ideas.
2, Alibaba Cloud’s first technical director
Lin Chenxin and Zhu Xi are high school students. After high school graduation, Zhu Xi went to Northeastern University, and Lin Chenxi came to Shanghai Jiaotong University. After graduating, he worked in the field of machine learning, computer vision, information retrieval, and distributed systems at Microsoft Research Asia. He then joined Alibaba in 2008 and formed and led the team as the first technical director of Alibaba Cloud. A flying distributed cloud computing operating system was built.
In addition, It is worth noting that under the help of policy warm winds and the blessing of the vast market, Yitu Technology can be said to be getting more and more smooth on the journey of capital, and more and more Investors have also found it.
In 2013, the company received a $1 million financing from the Angel Fund. Then in 2014, 2016 and 2017, they respectively obtained the multi-million dollar A round of financing of Sequoia Capital and Gaochun Capital, the tens of millions of dollars of B-round financing led by Yunfeng Fund, and Gaochun Capital. The group led the 380 million C round of financing. In June 2018, Etu Technology acquired a C+ round of $200 million financing from Gaocheng Capital, and since the completion of the July strategic financing in the same year, its valuation has exceeded 15 billion yuan.
(Source: 天眼查)
In this, the shadowy stocks behind the company’s technology have gradually surfaced. It is not difficult to see that in the company’s financing map, in addition to some well-known investment funds such as Zhenge Fund, Sequoia Capital and Gaochun Capital, a business community like Ma Yun also appeared. It is understood that Yunfeng Fund was established in April 2010. It is the only private equity fund initiated by successful entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and industry leaders in China. It contains some well-known business tycoons such as Ma Yun, Yu Feng and Shi Yuzhu. .
In the journey of financing according to the technology, the phenomenon of Yunfeng Fund’s repeated five times and five times is a good illustration of the fact that This is a company that Ma Yun saw.
2
“Live” in the billion-dollar market
What is artificial intelligence?
In a nutshell, artificial intelligence refers to the simulation of human consciousness and thinking processes, using machine learning and data analysis methods to give machine people the ability.
It is understood that the concept of artificial intelligence was first proposed in the 1950s, but because the computing power and algorithm are not mature enough, it has not been applied and promoted. With the birth of the “deep learning” neural network algorithm in 2006, artificial intelligence has entered a new stage of development, and there have been encouraging progress in speech recognition, visual recognition and natural language processing. Up to now, the deployment of artificial intelligence and the development of artificial intelligence have become part of national strategies.
And for the role of artificial intelligence, the founder of Yitu Technology, Zhu Xi, has brilliantly concluded that “the industry may underestimate the power of artificial intelligence.”
Indeed, the scale of investment and financing in the artificial intelligence industry has allowed the outside world to see the market space of this industry. According to the data of IT Orange, the investment and financing amount of China’s artificial intelligence industry has increased from 3.7 billion yuan in 2013 to 109.15 billion yuan in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 96.8%.
And taking the two major segments of the company’s main involvement, namely security and smart medical data, this market space is definitely worthy of envy.
First, the security 100 billion market has become the biggest demand for the development of computer vision in China. In 2018, China’s security market reached 687 billion yuan. China’s security market has grown rapidly, from 324 billion yuan in 2012 to 687 billion yuan in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 13%. It is estimated that by 2020, the total revenue of security enterprises will reach 800 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate. More than 10%.
(Source: wind)
Secondly, with the increasing proportion of medical devices used in people’s daily health care, the humanized needs of medical electronic products such as safety, reliability, and intelligence have become the focus of future product design. According to relevant data disclosure, in 2018, the sales volume of China’s smart medical market reached 70 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 27.8%; it is estimated that by 2020, the sales volume of China’s smart medical market will exceed 100 billion yuan, and the future development prospect is broad.
However, since AI is also all the giantsThe battlefield is a battleground. As more and more companies join, this market has gradually turned from the blue ocean to the Red Sea. Therefore, there are many challenges for Yitu Technology.
With artificial intelligence and two other unicorns, the core technology of Vision Technology is upgrading from face recognition platform Face++ to systematic AI algorithm engine Brain++. The business scene has also been upgraded from vertical scenes such as urban management, logistics, retail, real estate, mobile phone, and finance to the three major IoT scenario business groups: urban brain, supply chain brain, and personal life brain.
Shangtang Technology focuses on the development of large-scale face and image analysis systems, and its research and development in the field of face recognition is quite strong. Among them, the company’s new SensePass will integrate its business-leading deep learning face recognition algorithm, which will play a role in regional scenarios including office buildings, government offices, industrial parks, campuses, and residential quarters.
Comparing with the technology of these two unicorns, Shangtang has image and video editing technology and has a deep learning framework; and the contemptuous face technology is the most perfect among the three companies, and has human body recognition technology. It can identify gestures; on the contrary, it has target tracking technology according to the plan, and the technology research and development ability is relatively weak.
Therefore, in general, Shang Tang and contempt for products are biased towards technology, while the plans are biased towards commercial applications. Therefore, in this highly competitive industry, Etu Technology also faces the problem that the core technology is not hard enough. Once it has not accumulated data for a long time, there will be risks of being caught up by the peers.
In addition, it is worth noting that the difficulty in obtaining medical data also poses a bottleneck for future development. Just like the data used to train the model, including radiographic data, fundus image data, pathological image data, voice data, electronic case text data, etc., due to the current domestic not yet complete data ownership, use rights, privacy and other regulatory documents, Therefore, the channels and fees for each company to obtain data are also different, and this also involves personal privacy protection.
3
Conclusion
Even if the industry’s founder Zhu Xi said, “The industry underestimates the power of artificial intelligence,” in fact, it is normal to be underestimated as an emerging industry. After all, the glamorous appearance of all walks of life will be hidden. There is a hidden pain that is unknown.
For now, the company is also facing the problem of cooling the industry and its technology needs to progress. On the one hand, the artificial intelligence industry investment institutions are more rational. According to relevant data, in the first half of 2019, China’s artificial intelligence investment and financing amounted to 43.8 billion yuan, a decrease of 13% compared with the same period of last year. The amount will be lower than last year. On the other hand, the company’s own technology needs to be polished and completely removed from the core.The problem is that the technology is not hard enough and the medical data is difficult to obtain.
So, for the technology of the map, even in the future, even the stars and the sea, but also need to go down the ground.