Sibi completed 500 million yuan in new financing, will push AI chip and B-side intelligence services

According to an exclusive report from 36Sciences, Smart Speech Technology, Inc., has completed a new round of financing with an initial round of financing of 500 million yuan. It is controlled by Yuanxiao, Zhongmin Investment, Shenzhen Venture Capital, Foxconn, and MediaTek. Seschi has a relatively clear listing plan, preferred in the domestic capital market.

SB has completed the first round of financing of tens of millions of RMB in 2012. Lenovo Star, Qidi, etc. participated in the investment; completed the second round of financing of RMB 200 million in early 2016, Ali participated in the investment; completed in September 2016; Three rounds of financing, the financing amount and the capital are not yet announced.

In addition, Scipto officials also confirmed to 36氪 that the company had basically achieved a balance between revenue and expenditure in 2017 and is expected to achieve profitability in 2018; it has already reached cooperation with a chip giant in terms of AI chips, and the two parties will establish a joint venture company. The AI ​​chip for intelligent voice interaction is already in the R&D process, which is likely to become one of the important new sources of Scipto's revenue.

Sibi Chi is an AI company that has continued to focus on and reported on 36th, mainly providing human-computer interaction technologies, products and services based on intelligent speech and natural language. According to official information, it is a very few international companies that have independent property rights. One of the companies based on the innovation capability of the chain foundation, integrated speech language technology in English and Chinese (speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language understanding, intelligent interactive decision making, voiceprint recognition, gender and age recognition, emotion recognition, etc.), whose speech recognition, spoken dialogue Systems and other technologies have repeatedly won championships in the evaluation of the US National Bureau of Standards, the US Department of Defense, and international research institutions.

At present, the primary market head companies of intelligent voice track, including Insight, have basically been established for more than 5 years and entered the C-round. Over the past few years, because of fierce competition, companies on intelligent voice track Basically, the technology can only be exported externally for free. In recent years, the exploration of the technology to realize the benefits and make great revenues has just begun. It is also a common issue that several companies face in the next few years.

The introduction of hardware products and the addition of B-end service lines are the current common choices. The two major business directions of SBI are also consistent. Specifically, the first is smart terminal services, including DUI platforms, voice chips, and vertical solutions ( Vehicles, home, robots and other Internet of Things. etc. The second is the wisdom of the service, Business Assistant business intelligence service business to be announced soon.

At present, the smart voice track is in a sprint for revenue. Whether it is the already-listed ICTE News flight or the leading echelon of the non-listed company Sibi Chi, he went out to ask questions, and Yun Zhisheng chose to launch based on it. Hardware product strategy. From the actual revenue point of view, basically achieved a certain degree of effect. CEO Gao Shixing said that SBCI has achieved a basic balance of payments in 2017 and is expected to achieve profitability in 2018.

Different from going out and asking directly to do their own brand of hardware, SBCI's strategy is to empower terminals - to help more manufacturers become 'out of question'.

Splitting the specific business progress, intelligent terminal business, currently Sichi has already been connected to hundreds of millions of smart terminal products, and has been applied in the Internet of Things terminal products such as vehicles, homes, robots/story machines, etc.; In the automotive market, Pinchi’s market share has reached No. 1. It has entered the front loading market this year. Currently, it has established partnerships with more than ten depot companies including FAW, Great Wall, Volkswagen, Haima, and Xiaopeng Automobile; in the direction of smart home, SBCI's technology was applied to the cat elf X1/M1 cookie/tuga sugar, Tencent listened, Xiaomi Xiaoai classmates, Lenovo smart speakers and other well-known products, occupying the first place in the speaker market share; in home robots, In the field of children's story machines, SBCI has established cooperative relationships with the companies.

The reason why the company achieved high market share in cooperation with the market is that the analysis of this may be related to the company's three major advantages. Specifically, the first is more than 10 years think of Chi Chi has been concerned about voice interactive technology, voice recognition in the Internet of things , Synthetic, human-computer dialogue technology and other aspects have the technical advantages; Second, Sibi has already cooperated with many content service companies, integrated the user's commonly used services and content, and can provide better interactive experience; Third, can provide customers with Depth technical support.

Currently, a new trend to increase revenue is to push AI chips. Through AI chips, acoustic noise reduction, smart wake-up, speech recognition, semantic understanding, speech synthesis, back-end applications and services, etc. 'Into hardware products. In addition to increasing market share, it can also help companies generate direct revenue.

This time, Scipco officials also confirmed to 36, that they have reached cooperation with a chip giant in terms of AI chips. The two parties will set up a joint venture company. The AI ​​chip for intelligent voice interaction is already in the process of research and development. This is likely to happen. It has become one of the important new sources of sales for Sepico. At present, regarding the performance of this product, the possible selling price in the future is not yet open to the public.

The increase of the B-end service line is also a common choice for the race track. Sibig chose the Business Assistant enterprise intelligence service business to help customers in need to build an enterprise version of Siri. This business was started by the president of the BSI Beijing Research and Development Institute. Min is responsible for this. It has already carried out more than six months of research and development and will be released soon. From the current industry situation, To B's customers often need a set of solutions that can be landed. This means that Si Bichi's team may well need Perform certain project customization and landing implementation, or it has its own unique solution, which can be customized and scaled.

After years of fierce competition and free service period, the track for intelligent voice interaction has finally ushered in a new turning point - the rapid development and rapid growth of the Internet of Things. Gao Shixing believes that 2016 is likely to be the industry's 'explosion'. The period of ', 2017 is the 'explosion period', and in 2020 is expected to usher in the period of high-speed growth of users.

While the industry has ushered in a turnaround, this track is still fiercely competitive. In 2016, Alibaba Cloud opened its API. In early 2017, Baidu released a dialogue-based smart open platform DuerOS; in mid-2017, Tencent released a semantic analysis capability. Intelligent voice platform 'little micro'; News fly also launched the AIUI voice open platform.

At present, a pessimistic view on the market believes that even if this trend of intelligent voice track appears, it is likely that the ultimate benefit will come from the large companies with traffic and channel advantages. These companies have the ability to lay out the terminal's hardware products. In the hands of the user, the technology provider may only be able to allocate the small benefits of hardware sales and lose the possibility of doing follow-up services and operations.

According to analysis, on the one hand, all terminals in the future may have dialogue capabilities and provide a sufficiently large market base. On the other hand, there may be more than one entry for intelligent voice interaction, especially for terminals in industrial applications. The company is probably not monopolized.

2016 GoodChinaBrand | ICP: 12011751 | China Exports