Chinese AI startup Yi+ raises USD$15 million in Series B funding

BEIJING, Sept. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Beijing-based startup Yi+ (www.yijia.ai), which uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to provide intelligent media and marketing solutions, has recently obtained a USD$15 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Haitong Securities, with participation from BRJ Group and an investment fund under the Bank of Beijing. This brings Yi+'s total funding to over USD$25 million, including a Series A funding from Alibaba back in 2015. The startup's new capital will be used on research and development, product commercialization and entry into new global markets.

Founded in 2014, Yi+ is China's leading computer vision service provider. "Our mission is to harness the commercial value hidden in large amounts of visual information. Yi+'s technology improves products by enhancing user experience, thus allowing more to experience what the human eyes cannot see. This will fundamentally change the way we view our world," said Ms Zhang Mo, founder and CEO of Yi+.

At present, two flagship brands have been launched under the startup. They are Yi+ which is an artificial intelligence computer vision engine and Dress+, a search-by-image fashion app.

"With the assistance of technology, more visual data could be gathered, analyzed and processed instantaneously. Yi+ could realize the vision of smarter eyes everywhere," Ms Zhang added.

Indeed, Yi+ technical competencies were proven when they came in first for 10 categories at ImageNet 2015 and 2016, surpassing renowned tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung etc.

In the next stage of development, Yi+'s scenario-based, general object, product and facial detection, recognition, search and recommendation technologies will be employed in the media, entertainment and advertising industries. Intelligent solutions such as "TV+AI", "Camera+AI" and "Marketing+AI" will deeply transform human-computer interaction in image and video applications.

Ultimately, Yi+'s goal is to quickly integrate its intelligent solutions into each of these domains by helping companies to consolidate their traffic data and content, provide end-to-end services and ultimately, scale up their platforms.

In China, Yi+ technologies have been employed by a dozen of reputable brands, such as Alibaba and Huawei, servicing more than a total of 400 million users. In the media industry, Yi+ has been helping to achieve intelligent data analysis, content interaction and scenario-marketing.

Yi+'s members hailed from Columbia University, National University of Singapore, Peking University, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba and Baidu.