The AI Unicorn company Shang Tang Technology has just announced the completion of a $600 million Series C round of financing led by Alibaba Group, Suning's participation, and CB Insights has given a current valuation of $3 billion.
After following the plan and despising it, Shang Tang has also become a new target of “Ali” capital in the field of computer vision, and it has achieved the highest level in history – RMB 1.5 billion (according to the “Financial” magazine’s previous report). .
The combination of "Alibaba + Shangtang + Suning" is seen as a powerful team that undermines the new retail scene under the line, and heralds a new trend in the commercialization of computer vision technology - starting and landing new retail scenes.
This will be another new battlefield for AI after security and finance, and the new field is of great excitement. Investors commented that "it is closer to the buyer and closer to the money".
Why Ali: New Retail Layout
It is not surprising that Ali's shares in the stock market are not surprising. Compared with Tencent, Ali's layout in the AI field, especially in computer vision, has been more positive.
In 2014 and 2017, Ant Financial Team led the B-wheel and C+ round of Contempt Technology. In addition, the Yunfeng Fund, which Ma Yun personally held shares in, led the investment in B-round of Yitu Technology in 2016.
The reason why “Ali” is emphasized is that no matter which track is used in the Internet field, the startup company has basically gone through A-round, B-round, C-round... and will all enter the “BAT round” – it will inevitably be Faced with the "two horses" dispute.
But this time, Tencent’s actions were relatively conservative. Geek Park consulted several investment field professionals on this issue. They gave this analysis:
First of all, Tencent's main battlefield is not in the computer vision and new retail areas. It can be seen from the AI business setup diagram published by Tencent that Tencent AI's application scenarios mainly focus on content AI, social AI, game AI and platform tools AI.
In addition, while Ma Yun vigorously marched into and laid off the new retail area under the line, in addition to vigorously taking shares in mergers and acquisitions, it also included incubation and self-development (Tmall no-man shop). Tencent still focuses on business investment and Dora. Shang Jingdong together.
In yesterday's Tencent Internet+ event, Ma Huateng further explained Tencent's idea of new retail sales. “We don't want to be retail and we want to become a digital assistant for the retail industry.”
Ma Huateng stressed that Tencent "has no intention of opening a store," but is eager to "incubate" Tencent’s currently mastered technology in the field of smart retail sales and applications.
Secondly, Tencent’s technical background is more important than Ali. Ali itself is mainly model-driven, and Tencent is more technology- and product-driven. From the perspective of Tencent’s and Ali’s respective AI research institutes’ development models and personnel, Tencent’s AI’s With more understanding, technical strength may be stronger.
Currently, Ali's strength in the field of artificial intelligence is relatively weak. It is very important to invest in a scarce company with platform capabilities to master its own intelligent ecology.
When it comes to ecological layout, the core element is still the “new retail” scenario. The essence of this topic is mainly “the fusion of offline online data”.
For Ali, holding major channels such as Taobao, Alipay, and being hungry, has been able to fully grasp the online (retail) data; Correspondingly, the offline data has become a short board for which Ali needs urgently to make up.
At this stage, face recognition is the most important way to collect offline data, and Shangtang is considered as one of the best algorithm vendors. Therefore, Shangtang is one of the factors that contribute to this. Ali is also looking Zhong Shang Tang was able to help it better obtain offline data before joining Su Ning.
In fact, at the end of 2017, Shangtang had already settled in the offline store in Suning and provided its face recognition algorithm for its “no one” store. It has realized the unmanned flow and brushing process from entering stores, shopping, checkout, and going out of the store. Face payment.
In Bloomberg's latest report, Xu Li, co-founder and CEO of Shang Tang Technology, revealed that Shang Tang is developing a service called "Viper" to analyze data from thousands of real-time camera sources.
At the same time, Xu Li revealed that Shang Tang will build at least five small-scale supercomputer centers in the first-tier cities in the next year to promote Viper and other services. This business theme is basically in line with the smart city strategy advocated by Alibaba Cloud. .
However, it is not known how much of this data is related to "off-line retailing," because the current security project with government and enterprises is still the main business of Shangtang.
Why Shang Tang: Approaching the Vertical Market's "Escape Rate"
According to the data released by CB Insights, for the reference of Shangtang, with a valuation of US$3 billion, the other two top-ranked companies in China’s “AI Four Little Dragons” are valued as follows: According to the figure, the valuation is US$2 billion. Worth one billion US dollars.
From the perspective of time dimension and industrialization experience, Shangtang, which was established in 2014, does not have an advantage. However, in fact, in less than four years, Shang Tang has already become a “subsequent party” and has opened up with other players. distance.
To a certain extent, Shang Tang’s employees are very familiar with the accidental world and compare it with the entrepreneurial competitors, especially the “AI Four Little Dragons” appellation. In their view, their goals and vision are much greater - to become a platform level The artificial intelligence company, not only limited to a single computer vision technology.
In this regard, Xu Li and his teacher Tang Xiaoou, the founder of Shang Tang, had been clear when he was engaged in research at the Multimedia Lab of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and had elaborated on his early investor IDG Niu Kuiguang. Also accepted such views and ideas.
Below, the official data on Shangtang characteristics allows us to more intuitively understand this company:
1) Since the establishment of the early Shang Tang, the talent monopoly strategy has been used. To date, the team has recruited more than 150 Ph.D. students in computer vision related fields around the world. This is roughly a statistical analysis. This basically includes the major groups of talents in the AI field.
2) After getting B1 round of financing to weather the winter of capital, Shang Tang began to step up to invest in the construction of a supercomputer center. Now he has more than 8000 GPUs. At the beginning of this year, he again placed an order of $100 million to purchase GPUs.
3) In the past three years, the average annual growth rate of Shangtang's revenue reached 400%. In 2017, the company achieved positive profit, with revenue of less than RMB 1 billion.
4) Shangtang serves more than 400 customers, including Qualcomm, Honda, China Mobile, China UnionPay, CNN Credit, Huawei, Xiaomi and other companies and government agencies.
5) Shangtang’s business scope mainly covers security, smart phones, mobile internet, automotive and other industries. At the same time, education, new retail, airport, finance, building, operator market are its sprint into the industry, covering a total of more than 10 details. Vertical business line.
In simple terms, this is an AI startup that grew up with "Chinese speed."
Although the founding team had academic and laboratory backgrounds, its business model and trader's style were very "internetized." The "national team," which was established later in the year, is still yelling from the technology company that "doing an industry To break through the slogan, Shang Tang has gradually established his "4+6" and "1+1+X" business model.
“4+6” refers to the scope of business mentioned above. “1+1+X” refers to the business model of “1 (basic research)+1 (industry integration)+X (industry partners)” to create Artificial intelligence platform. In addition, since its inception, Shang Tang has started to set up joint ventures with traditional companies in the industry to cut into the vertical market faster.
In the past two years, Shang Tang also actively conducted joint investment with local governments and well-known funds. The company also set up a special warfighting department within the company.
From the perspective of its external capital operation mode, Shangtang has gained its essence in the three capital operation modes of “investment, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures.” This is very rare for a startup with a technological background.
It seems that there are some radical business operation models. The founding team has its own set of interpretations.
Xu Li called it "escape speed."
At an awards ceremony at the beginning of 2018, Xu Li once said, “When you innovate fast enough, when you really can really combine innovation and industry, then you have a very efficient move forward. The speed of rushing, and this speed is called escaping speed in physics. After reaching this speed, we can get rid of gravity, happily swim in our industry, and subvert our industry."
The "gravity" behind this comes from the fact that the window period caused by the fast iteration of the algorithm is shortened.
According to statistics, in the past five years, the image recognition neural network has had a 350-fold improvement in complexity, especially in the last two years. The neural network for speech recognition is also complicated by 30 times.
Faced with such rapid algorithmic iteration speeds, it will not be too long for companies that are known for their algorithmic expertise and growth as their core competencies. After that, strong landing and commercialization capabilities are needed.
For this reason, Shang Tang invested money in the early stages of establishing a deep learning algorithm framework, two sets of core infrastructure such as the Supercomputer Center, and even started the laboratory of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Because the underlying infrastructure is firmly established, So it is possible to use AI to empower the industry," Xu Li once said.
Through this round of cooperation between Ali and Shang Tang, “AI Energizing Business” has finally reached the “new retail” category from the traditional starting point. Many people believe that since then, this will become a technology company and giant ecology. Combined reference templates.