Chinese artificial intelligence startup SenseTime to raise up to $767 million in Hong Kong IPO
Daniel Levi
Posted On December 5, 2021
The highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) of Chinese AI facial recognition startup SenseTime is finally happening. After several false starts, SenseTime Group is looking to raise up to $767 million in its Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO), according to a report from Reuters, citing the company’s term sheet.
According to Reuters, SenseTime’s shares are due to price on Friday and start trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Friday, December 17. SenseTime plans to use cash from the IPO proceeds for research and development of its main AI technologies, the term sheet said. SenseTime declined to comment on the deal’s launch.
Four months ago, we wrote about SenseTime after China’s biggest artificial intelligence announced it was planning for an up to $2 billion PO) in the Hong Kong stock exchange at the end of August.
We’ve covered SenseTime extensively in the last three years. In October 2019, the United States put SenseTime on a trade blacklist. In 2018, SenseTime raised $600 million to become the most valuable AI startup in the world.
SenseTime is the developer of Face++, the technology used by the Chinese government to monitor and track its over one billion citizens. Face++ is also used by more than 300,000 developers in 150 countries to identify faces, as well as images, text, and various kinds of government-issued IDs.
SenseTime is China’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn focused on computer vision and deep learning technologies. The company is behind a proprietary deep learning platform, SenseTime has become the largest algorithm supplier in the country.
Founded in 2014 by Li Xu, Bing Xu, and Xiaogang Wang, SenseTime develops face recognition technology that can be applied to payment and picture analysis, which could be used, for instance, on bank card verification and security systems.
SenseTime currently provides its face recognition technology to over 300 companies including China Mobile Communication Co, China UnionPay, Huawei Technologies Co., Xiaomi, and JD.com. The company claims that its face recognition technology has an error rate below one in 100,000. SenseTime also provides text, vehicle, and image recognition to mobile Internet companies, financial services, and security companies.
