Vistring announced a $5 million Pre-A round of funding, led by Linear Capital and followed by Sequoia China Seed Fund. This round of funding will be used to enhance R&D, product iteration and talent acquisition of real-time video technology.
Founded in February 2020 and headquartered in Hangzhou, Vision Ruilai completed the angel round of financing jointly invested by Zhen Fund and Fengyuan Capital in September 2020. Vision Ruilai is committed to using Augmented Live Video to improve the effect and efficiency of video creation, combining the three key technologies of computer photography, artificial intelligence and mixed reality, enabling users to shoot high-quality videos more economically and quickly in a "combination of virtual and real" way, so that public users can easily perform video expression and achieve a communication experience of "online beyond offline". At present, the company is actively promoting the productization of enhanced real-time video technology in many fields, and has landed a number of solutions for the video fields such as short and medium video creation and live broadcasting.
Over the past few years, from Instagram to Douyin, from Zoom to Taobao Live, video as a tool for expression and communication has been rapidly gaining popularity, and the epidemic in 2020 has further accelerated this popularity. In this regard, Dr. Zhou Changyin, CEO of Vision Ruilai, said: "Video integrates vision, sound, sound effects and interaction, compared with words and pictures, it can carry richer content in expressing ideas and transmitting information, and can make the recipient's understanding more accurate." Therefore, we firmly believe that video is an important development trend in this era. But at the same time, we also found that the ability to "quickly produce and produce watchable videos" is still the patent of a few people today. Vision Ruilai hopes to enhance real-time video technology, generally reduce the investment in manpower, materials, time and so on in the video creation process, improve the efficiency and quality of creation, make the video more watchable and disseminated, and thus greatly liberate the productivity of the video. ”
In terms of team composition, Dr. Changyin Zhou, founder and CEO of Vision Ruilai, graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, served in Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft Research and Nvidia Research, and then joined the G Cam team of Google X as a founding member, is the main author of the core imaging technology of Google Glass and Android systems, and as a senior scientist of Google, led the technology research and development and product design of projects such as Superman Vision. After leaving Google, Dr. Zhou Changyin founded Visbit, an ultra-high-definition VR video technology company in Silicon Valley, and led the development and commercialization of the world's first 8K VR slice encoding and rendering technology.
Co-founder and COO Lu Yi graduated from Cornell University's School of Business Administration with an MBA degree, and has held a number of management functions such as product, branding, marketing, business development and other management functions in Microsoft, Starwood, Masco Group, Changyou and other companies, and has deep experience in the commercialization and marketing of technology products, and is also the co-founder of Dr. Zhou Changyin during his stay at Visbit.
The other core members of Vision Ruilai are mainly from world-class Internet technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Alibaba and world-class universities such as Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, Zhejiang University, etc., with comprehensive R&D capabilities in computing imaging, audio and video technology, deep learning, mixed reality, cloud service architecture, etc., and many have entrepreneurial experience.
Zheng Can, managing director of Linear Capital and head of investment in applied technology, said: "Real-time video is increasingly becoming an important carrier for people's communication and entertainment, and today network infrastructure is no longer a problem, but content production itself is still an important bottleneck. The Team has a deep accumulation in the core technology fields of computational photography, AI and graphics, which are related to real-time video processing, and we are very much looking forward to Dr. Zhou and the team using enhanced real-time video technology to help creators, liberate the productivity of video creation, and bring more possibilities to the industry." ”
Not long ago, Vision Ruilai and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Digital Economy Research Institute (IDEA), founded by Dr. Shen Xiangyang, former Global Executive Vice President of Microsoft, officially signed a contract to jointly establish idea Vistring Teleportation Lab, with real-time visual computing as the main research direction, to promote the research and development of in-depth technologies in the field of enhanced real-time video and dynamic light field. Dr. Zhou Changyin said that the company and the joint laboratory are currently increasing their efforts to recruit outstanding researchers and technical experts in the fields of computer vision, graphics, speech, and natural language processing to promote the technology research and development and product landing of real-time visual computing, so that "online" can surpass "offline".