At 9:20 on December 30, SenseTime was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with an IPO price of HK$3.85 per share and an issue size of HK$5.775 billion, becoming the first share of visual artificial intelligence in China.
The closing price on the first day of listing was HK$4.13, up 7.27%, and SenseTime's market value reached HK$137.456 billion, or about RMB112.273 billion (equivalent to Changan Automobile's market capitalization). SenseTime is the most funded company in the field of visual AI in China, and according to the IPO, SenseTime has made 12 financings with a total scale of US$5.2 billion.
Founded in 2014 by Xiaoou Tang, tenured professor of the University of Chinese, Hong Kong, CEO Xu Li and co-founder Xu Bing, both from the Multimedia Lab of the University of hong kong Chinese founded by Professor Tang. Another co-founder of SenseTime, Yang Fan, vice president of SenseTime, was a colleague of Tang Xiaoou when he was at Microsoft's Asian Research Institute.
Since its birth, SenseTime's academic atmosphere has been very strong, and even at the listing ceremony of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today, CEO Xu Li's speech was: "Distinguished teachers, distinguished guests, and all students of SenseTime.".
According to SenseTime's IPO prospectus, SenseTime has 40 professors, more than 250 PhD and phD students, and the R&D team consists of 3593 scientists and engineers. Since its establishment, SenseTime has maintained the annual release of 100+ papers at the top conference of visual algorithms such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, etc., and has released more than 600 top academic papers, surpassing most laboratories and enterprises.
From scientific research to technology landing, SenseTime also has 8029 patents (data from wisdom buds), visual processing such as image depth, bokeh, enhancement, and defuration, as well as related directions such as lane line detection and motion trajectory prediction.
The AI science hegemonic group formed by the "little o" group
Xiao O is Professor Tang Xiaoou's "stage name" during his time at the Microsoft Asian Research Institute, because he is too humorous, he was elected as the head of the cultural and labor troupe of the research institute, he has a famous saying: "Look at things to be divided into two, everything has two aspects, there is a ridiculous side, but also a more ridiculous side."
After graduating with a Ph.D. in MIT, Professor Tang xiaoou taught in the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Chinese, Hong Kong, and then participated in the establishment of the Multimedia Laboratory of the University of Chinese, Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, Tang Xiaoou served as the director of the visual computing group of Microsoft's Asian Research Institute and began to travel between Hong Kong and Beijing.
According to Professor Tang's personal blog, he has long admired Microsoft's Asian Research Institute, believing that "Bill made two great decisions in his life, the first was to sign a DOS agreement with IBM, and the second was to establish Microsoft Research Asia." "Microsoft Asia Research Institute was the only place in China at that time that was established by multinational companies to engage in basic research rather than product development.
In 2014, Tang Xiaoou and the Hong Kong Chinese Multimedia Lab announced that the face recognition accuracy rate of the DeepID deep learning model they developed reached 99.15% on the LFW (the most extensive test benchmark in the field of face recognition) database, while the accuracy of the human eye was 97.52%, and the accuracy rate of Facebook's model was 97.35% at the time.
DeepID's paper was named the best student paper in AAAI 2015, and the Hong Kong Chinese Multimedia Lab was selected as one of the world's top ten AI pioneer labs, becoming the only team in Asia to be selected.
Professor Tang's R&D team plans to open source DeepID to Android, iOS and Windows Phone developers free of charge, help developers develop face recognition-based applications on mobile phones, and hope to further improve the accuracy of the algorithm through user feedback data.
The research also attracted the attention of Niu Kuiguang, a partner of IDG Capital, who immediately flew to Hong Kong to visit, after which Tang Xiaoou and Xu Li, Wang Xiaogang and others from the Multimedia Lab, as well as Yang Fan at the same time as the Microsoft Asian Research Institute, jointly established SenseTime, and received tens of millions of dollars of IPG's Series A investment. Niu Kuiguang has since said, "This is the only project that IDG has invested in without looking at the product."
SenseTime's early financing was attracted by papers, and SenseTime's early team was also attracted by Professor Tang's papers. Professor Tang joked in his blog, "Another advantage of publishing these papers is that they attract a lot of good students, some of which can no longer be described as excellent, but can only be said to be geniuses." ”
"Xiaogang was the first talented student I met and published five CVPR/ICCVs at the master's level. His talent and character were so outstanding that I didn't hesitate to marry my sister to him. Later, another of my gifted students, Dahua, published more articles, but I had no sister to remarry. ”
Xiao Gang mentioned here is the chief scientist of SenseTime and the person in charge of SenseTime's smart car solution "Shadow". Wang Xiaogang graduated from the junior class of the Talented University of Science and Technology of China with the first place, and obtained a master's degree from the University of Chinese in Hong Kong and a doctorate degree from MIT.
"Dahua" is lin dahua, the co-founder of SenseTime, who graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, and has a master's degree from the University of Chinese of Hong Kong and a doctorate from MIT. It's all a shuddering resume.
SenseTime CEO Xu Li is pursuing a PhD at the University of Hong Kong Chinese, and although not a student of Professor Tang, he has a close relationship with the Multimedia Lab, and his resume is as glamorous as a bachelor's and master's degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and a Ph.D. from Chinese University of Hong Kong. Xu Li is as humorous as Professor Tang, and often jokes internally that he is "Guo Degang of Shang Tang".
SenseTime's playing style is very direct, that is, to recruit as many talents as possible, Xu Li also mentioned in the interview after this, "the core of the fight is still the top and most algorithm-aware talents, SenseTime's early gambling talent planning is right."
Professor Tang Xiaoou, who has recruited a number of talents in the field of computer vision, did not run SenseTime, and Xu Li, as CEO, is the main decision-maker of the company's development. Especially in recent years, Professor Tang Xiaoou no longer attends public events as the founder of SenseTime, mainly as the director of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and together with Tsinghua Yao Zhizhi and Tongji Chen Jie, he is the lead scientist of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The hope and dilemma of SenseTime AI landing
The strong academic atmosphere is the advantage of SenseTime, which can attract doctors in related fields to join, but it also increases the distrust of "scientist entrepreneurship" from the outside world. Some netizens jokingly called the source of Shang Tang's name, that is, Professor Tang reversed from Shang, referred to as Shang Tang
According to the Guanzhi Research Institute, an investor who had inspected SenseTime said: "I can't understand it at all, I feel that they have a lot of papers, but they don't look like a company." In 2015, SenseTime only had six months of cash flow, but it was still recruiting people, and Xu Bing was still talking to investors about the supercomputing platform. This costless layout makes investors very disgusted, and directly asks: "Are you doing research institutes or companies?" ”。
Talent training, thesis, construction of super calculation are very "burning money", according to SenseTime IPO prospectus, SenseTime in 2018, 2019, 2020 and the first half of 2021 net losses of 3.43 billion yuan, 4.97 billion yuan, 12.16 billion yuan and 3.71 billion yuan, the overall cumulative net loss of 24.27 billion yuan.
There is still an essential difference between commercial companies and research institutes, IPOs are not the end, and commercial companies still have business to support market value. As can be seen through the official website of SenseTime, at this stage, SenseTime has four main businesses, namely intelligent enterprise services, intelligent urban management, intelligent personal life, and intelligent automobile travel.
In its IPO prospectus, SenseTime summarized it as "one platform, four pillars", and "AI large device" general artificial intelligence infrastructure (including large models and supercomputing centers), "four pillars" is the four landing scenarios of the official website reality, toB's smart business, toG's smart city, To C's smart life, and the business that has been launched this year.
Smart business is through the sale of the Ark software platform to obtain revenue, SenseTime in Shanghai headquarters building on the application of this set of smart office platform, the building is equipped with a lot of cameras, each conference room also has facial recognition, the corridor has a password cabinet unlocked through facial recognition.
Stepping into the lobby on the first floor can complete the punch card and open the access control through facial recognition, the large screen in the hall will also display the visitor traffic in real time, and during the epidemic period, there will be AI cameras to measure the temperature without contact. The access control in the building also relies on facial recognition to unlock, and the conference room management needs to make an appointment on the office software and sign in through facial recognition before the meeting to prevent the use of the conference room from conflicting the time.
According to the IPO prospectus, senseTime's smart business revenue was 854 million yuan, 1.203 billion yuan, 1.485 billion yuan and 647 million yuan in 2018, 2019, 2020 and the first half of 2021, accounting for about 40% of the total revenue ratio.
To G business smart city, the basic capabilities and tools and smart business are the same, but the application scenario is placed in urban management, through the city camera to monitor the health of infrastructure such as street lights, communications, etc., as well as timely control of fire and smoke, emergency exit obstacles, exposed garbage, high-altitude falling objects, shared bicycle parking and other urban governance problems, and provide computing power support through the supercomputing center.
The smart city business also has urban service areas, such as face recognition ticket inspection at airport terminals and high-speed rail stations, which are also provided by SenseTime as a technology and hardware integration solution. The revenue of the smart city business in 2020, accounting for 39.7% of the total revenue of the whole year, together with smart business, has become the two major pillars of SenseTime's profitability at this stage.
The smart life business is closely related to us, including SenseME mobile phone business, SenseMARS hybrid display business, SenseHome smart home, SenseCare smart medical care, and SenseTime education.
At present, in the domestic Android mobile phone, most of the FaceID facial recognition unlock technology used is provided by SenseTime, in addition, the mobile phone will also provide video and picture management based on visual algorithms, help users automatically classify in the mobile phone album, and automatically generate "memory killing" videos.
SenseMARS hybrid display technology consumers are more exposed, and the AR filters in camera software such as Jimeng Camera are provided by SenseTime. In addition, SenseTime's AR technology has also landed in the field of cultural creativity and scenic spots, and SenseTime and the Forbidden City have cooperated to launch a lot of interesting AR cultural creations, such as "Qingming Home Map", which cuts out the characters in the painting through algorithms, and then scans them through mobile phones, and the characters in the frame move, and the old-fashioned cultural relics have become countless small stories of song dynasty city life.
Smart medical care automatically detects lung nodules, pneumonia foci and fractures through visual comparison of CT films, and improves the work efficiency of doctors. Smart education lies in the publication of basic textbooks related to artificial intelligence, as well as DIY programming robot tools, to cultivate children's interest in AI.
Smart Life's annual revenue in 2020 was 434 million yuan, accounting for 12.6%. In the smart car business, SenseTime is still in its infancy, and its business is mainly to provide car companies with intelligent cockpit solutions including facial recognition unlocking, OMS, DMS, multi-mode interaction capabilities, as well as L2+ assisted driving solutions, and L4 level automatic driving Buses.
Hong Kong stocks that broke through the "sanctions" were listed
The U.S. sanctions against SenseTime began in 2019, when the U.S. Department of Commerce added 28 AI companies, including SenseTime, to the Entity List, prohibiting U.S. companies from providing and purchasing products and services to them.
Before SenseTime was about to open a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on December 10, the U.S. Treasury Department added SenseTime to the so-called "List of Non-SDN Chinese Military Complex Enterprises", prohibiting U.S. capital investment in SenseTime. This directly led to SenseTime's announcement on December 13, postponing the launch time. SenseTime was originally scheduled to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 17, and the listing was only less than 2 weeks later than planned.
During these two weeks, SenseTime adjusted its cornerstone investment lineup, with GF Fund, Pleiad Fund, WT, Focustar and Hell Ved withdrawing from the original list. Xuhui Capital, Guotai Junan, Hong Kong Science and Technology Park Venture Capital Fund, Xima Ophthalmology, taizhou cultural tourism became new investors. The updated Cornerstone investor subscription reached $510 million, representing 68.9% of the offer shares, and the size of the investment increased by $0.6 billion.
In fact, The Academic Sensetime has always hoped to have open cooperation and exchanges with the United States, and at WAIC, Professor Tang Xiaoou also delivered a very meaningful speech, excerpted as follows:
Our mission is to "stick to the original and let AI lead the way for human progress." I have never found a better translation to explain this sentence, but today seeing so many top international companies here, I feel that instead of relying on myself, why not cooperate to meet this challenge? OK, Google, let's work together to make humanity greater. OK，Google，let us work together. Make Humanity Great Again！ Thank you! ”
Technological sanctions are a battle without smoke, and artificial intelligence will be the most important productivity tool in the future, and the crackdown sanctions on artificial intelligence companies are essentially trying to suppress us in productivity.
The landing of artificial intelligence will not only improve everyone's lifestyle, but also reduce the production cost of all walks of life, improve production efficiency, and play an important role in urban management, transportation, agriculture, industry, medical care, education, sports and other fields.
Such a war, we can not lose.