Sixteen months after the release of ChatGPT, a Beijing-based AIGC company was the first to IPO in Hong Kong.
On April 24, Mobvoi officially landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and won the title of "AIGC No. 1 Share" in Hong Kong stocks. As of press time, the company's market capitalization is more than HK$4.8 billion.
Among the large model star companies, Li Zhifei has led Mobvoi to ring the bell of listing first after ten years of hard work, not only allowing the company's AIGC solution to serve more than 9 million users, but also worth more than 1.2 billion Hong Kong dollars.
At the same time, investors such as Sequoia China, Zhen Fund, SIG Haina Asia, Google, Yuanmei Optoelectronics, Goertek and other investors who have accompanied the company's growth all the way have finally ushered in their own harvest moment.
Ph.D. started a business and is worth more than 1.2 billion Hong Kong dollars
His strong interest in AI eventually led Li Zhifei to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in thermal engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, he turned to the arms of computers, and studied for a master's degree and a doctorate in related fields at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Nanyang Technological University. In 2010, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and became interested in the cognitive problems of AI.
In order to experience Silicon Valley up close, Li Zhifei then joined Google as a research scientist, and began to be responsible for the algorithm research and development of language translation models, and made Google's mobile phone offline translation system. However, when he first joined the company, the entrepreneurial seeds planted in his previous internship at a start-up company began to grow rapidly in his heart. It wasn't until Apple introduced Siri that he felt his chance had come.
With the mission of "defining the next generation of human-computer interaction", he returned to China in 2012 and founded Mobvoi in Beijing, focusing on To C. Based on the deep learning framework, Mobvoi has developed an end-to-end speech AI system including signal processing, speech recognition, NLP and search recommendation, and launched the voice assistant "Xiaowen" on multiple terminals.
Along with the launch of the product, the company also arranged commercialization early. Starting from a small WeChat official account to embedding the app into Google Glass, although the company launched the brand "Mobvoi", behind the excitement is a commercial setback - not only the willingness of users to pay is low, but even the number of active users is getting fewer and fewer.
After thinking about it, Li Zhifei chose to do hardware in 2014 to find an entry-level product for the company's voice interaction. For him, who has no experience in hardware, it is an extremely difficult decision to lead Mobvoi on the road of combining software and hardware. Fortunately, Nokia China was laid off, and the company successfully recruited digital hardware engineers and began to enter smart hardware.
In 2015, Mobvoi released the TicWatch watch, a smart device with a voice assistant and a combination of software and hardware. In less than a year, 100,000 units of the watch were sold, and the total sales reached hundreds of millions of yuan. Since then, smart cars, smart speakers, smart headphones and other products have come out one after another, and Mobvoi has also actively expanded its To B business under the pressure of survival.
The scope of the business is constantly expanding, the size of the company is growing, and everything seems to be moving in a good direction. Until the Internet giants entered the market, the subsidy strategy of the opponent directly gave Mobvoi a little competitive shock. Eventually, the company initiated a business realignment in 2019 and shrank its front.
When GPT-3 appeared in 2020, Mobvoi also began to set foot in the AIGC field, and launched the large model "UCLAI" (universal Chinese language AI), as well as released a series of AIGC solutions. Two years later, the release of ChatGPT quickly formed a global wave of AGI, and the company also took advantage of the trend to upgrade "UCLAI" to "Sequence Monkey" in 2023, and also launched AIGC products in the fields of writing, painting, dubbing, and digital humans.
After ten years of development, Mobvoi successfully won the "first share of AIGC". At the same time, Li Zhifei, who owned 26.72% of the company's shares before listing, was also worth more than 1.2 billion Hong Kong dollars.
Sequoia and Zhenge have both invested, with a cumulative financing of more than 200 million US dollars
With the halo of a Google scientist on his head, relying on a demo that doesn't even have an interface, Li Zhifei got $1.62 million from Sequoia China and Zhen Fund.
In December 2013, Mobvoi received about $8.15 million from Sequoia China, Zhen Fund, and SIG Haina Asia. From the first meeting with Li Zhifei to the completion of the payment by SIG Haina Asia, it only took more than 40 days.
"For me, it's a very quick investment. Wang Qiong, partner of SIG Haina Asia, once revealed that Li Zhifei has a visionary view of voice interaction changing people's lifestyles, and he has the potential to transform algorithms into products with the ability to engineer.
Zheng Qingsheng, partner of Sequoia China, said: "We look forward to the company continuing to create more value for users with excellent products and services at a new starting point." ”
Since 2015, Mobvoi has completed three consecutive rounds of financing within one year, and has received a total of $66 million from Yuanmei Optoelectronics, Goertek, Google, etc. When Google approached him for business cooperation, Li Zhifei was skeptical. As the partnership progressed smoothly and trust and recognition were built, Google had the idea to invest in the company.
"Mobvoi has developed a very unique and self-contained speech recognition and natural language processing technology. Don Harrison, Google's vice president of corporate development at the time, said, "We were impressed by their innovative technology and development potential, so we quickly decided to invest in helping them grow rapidly in the future." ”
In October 2016, Mobvoi entered the field of vision of the Volkswagen Group, and the two sides started financing communication for about half a year. In the end, the company closed a $140 million Series D1 funding round from the Volkswagen Group, and the two companies also formed a joint venture to bring artificial intelligence technology to new areas of mobility.
When the time came to September 2019, the company received about $16.86 million from Volkswagen Group and Google, and the valuation reached about $757 million. Two years later, Mobvoi bought back all of Volkswagen Group's shares in the company for $17 million and sold all of its shares in the joint venture to Volkswagen Group for $15 million.
With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, many investors have also become interested in Mobvoi, but Li Zhifei bluntly said in April 2023, "Our company has enough money to do what we want to do." As of the end of 2023, the company had cash and cash equivalents of approximately $144 million.
"I'm not going to tell a lot of stories to capital for the sake of financing, and catering to capital to some extent will inevitably lead to deformation." In his opinion, if you want to throw in Mobvoi, the company's valuation, future story, business model, etc., will make things complicated, "so I don't think about financing at the moment."
A month later, Mobvoi submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the first time. A year later, the company successfully landed on the Hong Kong stock market.
It is worth mentioning that in the process of a series of mergers and acquisitions on Mobvoi, Xu Xiaoping, the founder of New Oriental and Zhen Fund, also became shareholders of this company, with shareholding ratios of 2.47% and 1.11% respectively.
Prior to the listing, SIG Haina Asia held 17.03% of the shares, making it the largest external shareholder, Google held 13.26% of the shares, Sequoia China held 10.92% of the shares, Goertek held 10.03% of the shares, and Zhen Fund held 3.07% of the shares.
Based on a rough market capitalization of HK$4.8 billion, the value of the shares held by these investors is HK$817 million, HK$636 million, HK$524 million, HK$481 million, and HK$147 million respectively.
It has more than 14 million users and an annual income of more than 500 million yuan
Under the influence of ChatGPT, Sora, etc., Mobvoi is also accelerating its embrace of the AGI wave.
On the one hand, he launched his own large-scale model "Sequence Monkey", and on the other hand, he wanted to accelerate the understanding and make the product effect close to Sora. In Li Zhifei's view, the end game of the AIGC products made by Mobvoi in the past is video generation, and in order to make their products more competitive, they must understand and keep up.
Based on past experience and accumulation, the company currently chooses to focus on generative AI and voice interaction technology to provide users with AIGC solutions, AI enterprise solutions, smart devices and accessories.
Among them, the AIGC solution can provide users with services such as dubbing, writing, and digital humans, and has attracted about 840,000 users to pay so far, generating a total of more than 1 million payments.
With a first-mover advantage, coupled with a powerful product, Mobvoi now has more than 14 million users around the world. Among them, there are more than 9 million users of AIGC solutions. In addition, the company has pre-installed more than 2 million cars with the company's in-vehicle voice interaction solutions in enterprise-related scenarios, and has sold more than 1 million smart devices in consumer-related scenarios.
With the support of content creators, businesses, and consumers, the company's revenue is growing. According to the prospectus, in the reporting period from 2021 to 2023, the company's revenue will be 398 million yuan, 500 million yuan, and 507 million yuan respectively. CIC Consulting bluntly said that in terms of revenue in 2022, Mobvoi ranks third in China's market share in the field of AI voice technology and NLP software solutions.
However, due to factors such as R&D, redeemable preferred shares and changes in the book value of ordinary shares, the company is still in a loss-making state, with net losses of 276 million yuan, 669 million yuan and 802 million yuan respectively during the reporting period.
Since 2021, the company's investment in R&D has increased year by year. It was 92 million yuan in 2021, then 119 million yuan in 2022, and 155 million yuan in 2023. Such investment finally allowed Mobvoi to have a total of 749 domestic and foreign patents and patent applications.
The market for AIGC is quite large and growing rapidly. According to the forecast of CIC, the global AIGC market size will increase from 4.6 billion yuan in 2022 to 127.5 billion yuan in 2027.
OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Byte, Alibaba, Tencent, etc. have stirred up the market, and large model startups such as Dark Side of the Moon, Baichuan Intelligence, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Zero One Everything have also grown into unicorns.
Mobvoi's listing may just add fuel to this long-term competition. After all, in the face of the technological revolution brought about by AGI, no one wants to miss out and be left behind.
Resources:
1. "Miss A Talks to Li Zhifei: Understanding Sora, Reproducing Sora", Jiazi Lightyear
2. "Miss A Talks to Li Zhifei: There Must Be a Ruler in My Heart", Jia Zi Lightyear
3. "Mobvoi Li Zhifei: The Loneliness of AI Entrepreneurs", Xtecher
4. "What's it like to be invested in by Google?", Geek Park
5. "After leaving Google, he did what Google wanted to do but couldn't do in China, and got hundreds of millions of dollars in investment", China Entrepreneur Magazine
6. "A "Buddhist" Model Entrepreneur: The Industry Is Rolly, But I Don't Consider Financing", China Entrepreneur Magazine