It might come as a surprising fact that there are presently 14 Chinese AI organizations valued at $1 billion. These unicorns worth consolidated comes to $40.5 billion, as per a report China Money Network released during the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos gathering in Beijing.
Just to place these numbers in context. Google purchased DeepMind for over $500 million in 2014. Chinese voice recognition giant iFlytek Co. has a market capitalization of 63 billion yuan ($9.2 billion). Chinese AI startups raised $27.7 billion through 369 VC deals in 2017, as per a report from Tsinghua University.
A recent research shows that venture capital investment in computer vision technology firms has increased four-fold from 2016-2018 surpassing an aggregate of $8 billion USD. We analyzed more than 1400 deals during this multi year time frame. Our analysis additionally shows that Chinese investors putting resources into Chinese organizations are overwhelming the space representing over 56% of overall dollars contributed and 8 of the 10 greatest deals.
2018 investments by organizations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was three times the United States and practically 66% of overall capital contributed. It was the turn around in 2016 when United States financial investors put four times more capital into computer vision than PRC investors. The data likewise shows that PRC investors siphoned 20 times more capital into computer vision in 2018 than they did in 2016. What’s more, in 2018, the average deal size in China was nine times that of the US. So this isn’t tied in with spreading more money to more organizations however concentrating greater investment capital in fewer startups. Despite the fact that the data does exclude each and every worldwide venture capital investment it catches enough transactions to make this a clear pattern.
Digi-Capital’s AR/VR/XR Analytics Platform indicated Chinese investments into computer vision and augmented reality advances surging to $3.9 billion over the last 12 months, while North American augmented and virtual reality investment tumbled from about $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017 to under $120 million in the third quarter of 2018. Simultaneously, VC notion on virtual reality softened significantly.
Mobile augmented reality and Computer Vision/Machine Learning (“CV/ML”) are at the far edges of the range, one delivering new user experiences and UIs and the other powering a wide scope of new applications (not simply mobile augmented reality).
The market for mobile AR is at an early stage and accelerator has seen $50 to $100 million exits in 2018/2019. Dominant organizations will set aside some effort to rise, and it will likewise require some investment for developers to learn what works and for customers and organizations to adopt mobile AR at scale. (Note: Digi-Capital’s base case is mobile AR income won’t generally take off until 2019, in spite of 900 million installed base by Q4 2018.) Tech investors are most interested in native mobile AR with critical use cases, not ports from different platforms.
This is proof supporting Beijing’s objective of dominating artificial intelligence by 2030. It is expected to see significant computer vision innovation develop out of China throughout the next five years and furthermore foresee that they will take a dominant position in the computer vision and video analytics global markets.
It appears that PRC perceives the crucial position computer vision and video analytics plays in AI. Computer vision and video analytics are pivotal artificial intelligence abilities and are important to most leading-edge physical business applications including autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT) physical security, retail footfall and attention analysis, and smart manufacturing automation.
Started in 2017, Ubtech extended its product offering to enterprise-facing robots. It released a cloud-based customer service robot, Cruzr, which is expected to be utilized out in the public spots, local government workplaces and schools. More than 2,000 of the Cruzr units will be deployed in retail locations across China this year at the offices of Ubtech’s strategic investor, Beijing Easyhome Furnishing Chain Store Group. Also, Ubtech soon plans to release a robot security patrol vehicle that can be utilized to identify intruders.
Ubtech is right now concentrating its research on huge scale humanoid robots, as the greater part of its robots are at present small to medium sized. It intends to keep looking into humanoid robot drive servo, gait motion control algorithm and computer vision. Another heading it might likewise seek after is filling in as a point of control for smart home gadgets, maybe as a choice to smart speakers. At last, organizer Zhou’s dream is to deliver robots that would permit each robot to have another robot companion.
Indeed, machines have confounded pictures of blueberry muffins with chihuahuas. Yet, how about we not let that occupy us from the striking jumps of the previous few years. With progressions in convolutional neural network (CNN) machine learning and machine vision sensor advances (e.g., liquid lenses), computer vision abilities are soaring and for certain uses have outperformed human vision. Computer vision applications around object recognition in poor visibility, multi-spectral imaging and rapid multi-object tracking can possibly transform our lives and disrupt industries as the world gradually changes to one where undoubtedly, the walls have eyes.