China based AI startup, SenseTime today announced that it has successfully raised US$600 million in its Series C round of funding by an investment group lead by Alibaba Group other participants such as Temasek and Suning.
The Company set a record by raising US$410 million in its series B round of funding last July, it once again sets a new record for venture capital funding in the AI sector. The capital injection will provide important impetus to the buildout of SenseTime’s AI platform, advancing the company’s technological innovation and opening up new business opportunities.
Li Xu, SenseTime Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Li Xu, SenseTime Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, said, “SenseTime has established an AI ecosystem anchored with robust research, deep industry collaboration, and diverse partnerships. Our Round C funding will maximise these advantages by accelerating the development of a global footprint with a larger ecosystem incorporating both domestic and overseas partners. The funding will also help us widen the scope for more industrial application of AI, thus increasing the value of SenseTime’s global ecosystem.”
Joe Tsai, Executive Vice Chairman of Alibaba Group, said: “SenseTime is doing pioneering work in artificial intelligence. We are especially impressed by their R&D capabilities in deep learning and visual computing. Our business at Alibaba is already seeing tangible benefits from our investments in AI and we are committed to further investment. Our strategic partnership with SenseTime will spark more innovation and create value for society.”
Currently, SenseTime’s high-performance deep learning supercomputing platform is one of China’s largest, boasting over 8,000 GPUs. It is able to support building models with hundreds of billions of parameters, categorizing hundreds of millions of data and training billions of images. Thanks to its innovative technologies, the Company leads the industry in a range of fields such as facial and image recognition, autonomous driving, medical imaging and deep learning hardware optimization. As to date, it has become China’s largest AI platform company and AI algorithms supplier.
