If you take stock of the keywords in the AI field from 2023 to 2024, "going overseas" will inevitably be one of the phenomenal ones.
Since the second half of 2023, a large number of Chinese AI entrepreneurs have set their sights overseas, marching into the United States, Japan, Singapore and other regions. Among these AI companies going overseas, there are not only giants, but also veterans of SaaS transformation to AI Apps, and a large number of young start-ups or individual developers.
As an AI company that has gone through the cycle, Mobvoi going overseas is also one of the cores of the company's commercialization strategy.
Mobvoi began its overseas journey as early as 2016, first its smart hardware product TicWatch landed in developed countries and regions such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada, and became well-known overseas. At the same time, Mobvoi has danced with international giants such as Google and Qualcomm many times, and has become an AI company invested and accompanied by Google for ten years; In 2023, the overseas version of "Magic Sound Workshop" "Dupdub" will be launched, and Mobvoi's AIGC going overseas has set off a craze for overseas netizens to "pinch their voices".
Recently, Mobvoi passed the hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and plans to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which will soon become the "first stock of AIGC".
Among them, in addition to the brand barriers built by solid product and technology accumulation, Mobvoi's globalization road also embodies the long-term value of this company.
1. Globalization genes, dancing with international giants
Mobvoi has been a company with international genes since its inception.
As one of the most senior natural language scientists in the technology startup circle, Li Zhifei, the founder of Mobvoi, was born in the Language and Speech Processing Laboratory (CLSP) of Johns Hopkins University in the United States. As early as when the founder was a student at CLSP, he began to write a story of using AI language and speech technology to explore the way forward and hope to change the world.
In 2012, Li Zhifei returned to China to start his own business, bringing back to China his experience in machine translation and speech recognition at Google. At the beginning of its establishment, Mobvoi attracted a large number of engineers from Google and Microsoft to join, and later it was named the "collector of famous American schools" because it recruited many graduates from Harvard, Stanford and MIT. This also establishes the corporate culture characteristics of Mobvoi, that is, as a technology company with a strong Silicon Valley start-up style.
At the beginning of the business, Mobvoi entered the market with voice assistant software and launched the TicWatch smart watch in 2015. In the same year, Mobvoi reached a strategic cooperation with the international giant Google and obtained investment from Google, thus making great strides on the road to true globalization.
At present, 61.9% of Mobvoi's global employees are R&D personnel, and most of them have overseas university backgrounds.
2. From TicWatch to DupDub, adhere to the global product strategy
It is worth mentioning that in recent years, nearly 50% of Mobvoi's revenue composition has been contributed by overseas business, which is due to Mobvoi's advanced international products and channel layout.
As early as 2016, Mobvoi began its journey to the sea, and its smart wearable brand TicWatch was a great success in its first crowdfunding.
With a keen sense of globalization and localized operation capabilities, Mobvoi has achieved good results in overseas markets. In the following years, TicWatch has been in the top 3 of the BestSeller list of smart watches for many years. Among them, TicWatch Pro 3 has become the world's first wearable device based on Qualcomm 4100 chip + Google Wear OS operating system, and this is also the first time that Chinese companies have impressed Qualcomm, which has always been rigorous in R&D and products, and has become an alpha user in the wearable field of Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 chip, dancing with international giants.
It can be said that on the road to internationalization, Mobvoi's TicWatch series products have long become the world's leading AI wearable brand with exquisite design, high-quality user experience and ultimate technological innovation. Today, the TicWatch series products have been iterated to the flagship version of TicWatch Pro 5, which are exported to more than 150 countries and regions such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada.
(Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 is sold in developed countries and regions in Europe and the United States)
Based on international genes and global layout, Mobvoi has an experienced full-stack AI international team very early, and is one of the few global startups in the industry that has R&D, product, brand, e-commerce, sales, and toB solution capabilities, and has a solution-oriented global R&D structure.
In this wave of AI, Mobvoi also grasped the opportunity to go overseas in the field of AIGC and started its global layout early.
In addition to smart hardware going overseas, in 2022, Mobvoi launched the pace of AIGC going overseas and launched the overseas version of the "Magic Sound Workshop" product "DupDub". With more than 130 realistic voices and more than 15 editing functions, "DupDub" supports more than 37 languages, providing audio and video creators with transcription, subtitle alignment and downloading, as well as digital human tools and platforms, becoming an important tool for creators on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. On this basis, Mobvoi has also developed ultra-realistic speech synthesis technology to help DupDub achieve three-second cloning of human voices and maintain its technological leadership.
Today, "DupDub" provides services to more than 40 countries and regions around the world, and has been selected into the "AI Product List" to go overseas on the list of stars.
3. Blessing of well-known shareholders and favor of international capital
It has an international product and channel layout, and the background of Mobvoi's shareholders is also very international and diverse.
With the support of diversified layout and strong technical strength, Mobvoi has received investment from internationally renowned institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Zhen Fund, SIG Haina Asia, Goertek, Google, etc., among which Google has been running for nearly ten years.
In addition, Nvidia is also an in-depth cooperation company between Mobvoi in the field of AIGC, and the cooperation results between Mobvoi and NVIDIA in 3D digital humans were announced at the GTC 2024 event not long ago. These shareholders and partners not only bring strong financial support to the company, but also help provide a platform and channel network for international strategic cooperation and resource integration.