Sailing Capital International (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., a RMB-denominated investment and loan fund created under the support of the Shanghai Municipal Government, has led a US$60 million series funding round in SenseTime, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence start-up.
Ranked fifth in China Money Network's China AI Top 10 Ranking earlier this year, SenseTime currently provides its face recognition technology to over 300 companies including China Mobile Communication Co, China UnionPay, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Xiaomi Inc. and JD.com Inc..
Founded in 2014, SenseTime says its face recognition technology has an error rate below one in 100,000. It also provides text, vehicle and image recognition to mobile Internet companies, financial services and security companies.
"SenseTime has strong innovative technology development capacities and has a good business model. Its team have solid experience in the fields of deep learning and face recognition, and is doing well in industrialization," said Liu Xiaodong, president of Sailing Capital.
Liu said that SenseTime's technologies are similar to Mobileye, the Israeli company developing vision technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. Intel announced a deal to acquire Mobileye for US$15.3 billion in March. He hopes that SenseTime will become an important player in helping facilitate industrial upgrade in China.
SenseTime, with offices in Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, previously raised US$120 million round from CDH Investments, Dalian Wanda Group, IDG Capital, StarVC and others last December. No information is available on the company's previous funding rounds.