Megvii raised almost $750 after backup from Alibaba
Megvii, China’s most ambitious artificial intelligence startups which were working on facial recognition has successfully raised a total of $750 million in their series E investment round.
Megvii was basically founded by three graduates of the Tsinghua University, which is in China. This company has been in business for almost 8 years. Now, the company specializes in its computer vision solutions which include public security as well as mobile payments. This startup is now funded by Alibaba which is one of the main reasons why they can raise such a big amount of money.
According to a report which was made by Bloomberg in the month of January, the company Megvii can raise almost close to $ 1 billion just with the help of their initial public offering in Hong Kong. This whole new Capital injection can lift the valuation of the company to almost close to $4 million. This round of investment was a big step for the company’s growth.
China is now on its way to overtaking the United States of America in various aspects of technology such as artificial intelligence. All the money that was invested in artificial intelligence in the year 2017 mostly went to startups in China. Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence came out with a report where it showed that China is getting close to the number of research papers published with respect to the United States of America.
All the major publishing houses such as the New York Times has pointed out that China is flourishing very rapidly when it comes to artificial intelligence. Facial recognition is also one of the things which are helping the police to identify criminals, but people have shown their concern in its use as a surveillance tool.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Megvii has received its funding just after the Human Rights Watch report has mentioned them as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. It has been allegedly said that police application which was collecting data of the Muslims minority group from the province of Xingjian, a western province in China. Megvii has denied their links to any of the Integrated Joint Operations Platform database.
Kai-Fu Lee the world known artificial intelligence investor and expert has said that any country of the world can end up abusing artificial intelligence. He also said that China is one of the countries which use artificial intelligence for education, retail, urban traffic, and other sectors. With this series E investment, the company can attach itself with some of the big companies in the global market. Companies like Bank of China Group was a part of this investment round. Some of the foreign investors for this round were Dhabi Investment Authority, which is one the largest sovereign wealth funds and the Australian investment bank Macquarie Group.
Megvii has been very vocal about the money that they have raised in this round of investment which will be going towards commercialization of their services that are related to artificial intelligence so that they can go global. China has been known for sharing artificial intelligence technologies with different countries around the globe.
Yitu ended up opening a new office last year in Singapore so that they can work in the global market. Andrew Downe, the Asian regional head of the commodities and global markets at Macquarie Group said:
“Megvii is a global Artificial intelligence technology leader and innovator with cutting edge technologies, a scalable business model and a proven track record of monetization. We believe the commercialization of artificial intelligence is a long term focus and is of great importance.”