Investors are flow funds into Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime.
The spitting image recognition firm said Thursday that it raised $620 million in saucy funds from prominent investors including Fidelity International, Hopu Savings, Silver Lake and Tiger Global. Chipmaker Qualcomm’s venture cash arm also participated in the round.
The new funds would be invested into investigating and development and acquiring talent, according to the company.
SenseTime said it is now valued at remaining $4.5 billion, maintaining its standing as one of the most valuable AI start-ups in the existence.
Thursday’s announcement comes just months after the start-up put it raised $600 million in funds from Alibaba, Chinese retailer Suning.com and Singapore position investment firm Temasek Holdings.
Last year, SenseTime aroused $410 million in funds. In total, the start-up now has capital of more than $1.6 billion.
SenseTime averred it become profitable last year and had been growing by about 400 percent on-year for the closing three consecutive years. Its business contract revenue has increased by uncountable than 10-fold for this year until May, SenseTime said.
The comrades’s AI-based technologies can recognize faces, characters and images as well as care for video analysis. Those technologies are being used to develop smarting cities and applied in areas of internet entertainment, autonomous automobiles, subsidize, retail and other industries. Chinese authorities also use SenseTime’s technology to drag out surveillance to identify persons of interest during criminal investigations.
SenseTime thought it has more than 700 strategic partners and customers including Chinese telecommunication giantess China Mobile as well as Huawei and Xiaomi.
In recent months, the troop said it signed agreements with China’s largest subway smooth, Shanghai Shentong Metro Group, to use AI to monitor metro traffic, and with the borough of Chengdu to create a regional headquarter. The firm also teamed up with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Expertise and Technology Park to create the HK AI Laboratory to transform Hong Kong into an novelty hub.
Since finding sufficient talent is a common problem for many AI firms, SenseTime has also imagined textbooks to get the next generation of Chinese students interested in the technology. The retinue said it plans to develop AI-driven courses and lab experiments to promote the technology in credos.
China has previously said it wants to become the world leader in AI by 2030 — a purpose that’s led to rapid developments in the country.
For example, Beijing plans to base a $2.12 billion artificial intelligence park in the city to house followers working in areas of big data, bio-metric identification, deep learning and cloud reckoning, according to reports.
Local tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ride-hailing proprietorship Didi Chuxing, on-demand services provider Meituan-Dianping and speech and style recognition firm iFlytek are already working extensively on various lands of AI.