This Intel-backed China start-up is building ‘brains’ for self-driving cars, powering surveillance cams
Horizon Robotics founder Yu Kai is developing artificial intelligence chips that will be used in autonomous vehicles and power facial recognition
Surveillance cameras powered by its AI chips have been deployed in some of the busiest subway stations in Beijing, with the ability to identify 200 different faces in real-time. Horizon’s technology also enables Belle Holdings to track how many people enter its boutiques, their gender and age, and record how many people pick up a shoe and try it, and how many proceed to purchase the pair. The company is working with German luxury carmaker Audi and China’s Chongqing Changan to develop autonomous vehicles.
Founded in 2015 by Yu Kai, the Beijing-based start-up counts Intel Corp as an early investor. He is now pushing Horizon to develop AI chips to enable autonomous cars to “see”. Unlike many competitors that are developing AI applications hosted on a network of remote servers, or cloud, Yu believes that embedded AI will carry the day because it is faster, less costly and consumes less power and bandwidth.
From travel and retail to banking, China’s facial-recognition systems are becoming part of daily life
“Our goal is to power more than 100 million smart cameras by 2020 and equip 30 million cars with our processors by 2025,” Yu, 41, said in an interview in Beijing’s tech hub Zhongguancun. “Chips are regarded as the holy grail for computing. But China has missed the game in the personal computer era. So when the era of AI comes, I think our chance to create chips and processors to power the brain of AI has arrived.”
China has missed the game in the personal computer era. So when the era of AI comes, I think our chance to create chips and processors to power the brain of AI has arrived
An AI wave is sweeping China’s tech industry after the government identified it as a strategic sector to support. At the centre of that push is a national plan to build a 1 trillion yuan (US$152.5 billion) AI industry by 2030, and integral to that is developing home-grown companies able to produce enough processors to cut China’s spending of more than US$200 billion on imported chips.
As the world’s largest market for semiconductors, China has so far failed to break the dominance of Intel and Qualcomm in making central processing units, which are brains of computers and smartphones.
A growing number of China chip start-ups, including Yu’s Horizon, are emerging to challenge the incumbents.
Venture capitalists invested more than US$1.5 billion in chip start-ups globally last year, nearly double the investments made the year before, according to CB Insights, the research firm. Horizon is about to kick off a new round of fundraising targeting hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, Yu said, taking advantage of investor interest in the sector.