Telecommunications and internet group SoftBank is lining up an investment of almost $1bn in China-based image recognition technology provider SenseTime, Bloomberg reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.
Terms of the investment, which would be made through SoftBank’s Vision Fund, are still being finalised. A prospective valuation has not been disclosed but SenseTime was valued at $4.5bn as of its last funding, a $620m series C-plus round in May this year.
Founded in 2014, SenseTime produces artificial intelligence technology capable of recognising faces, vehicles and objects on a large scale.
The company is increasingly moving into the augmented reality and autonomous driving sectors but its technology is utilised most thoroughly in mass surveillance systems. It is developing a software product, Viper, that will analyse data from more than 100,000 camera streams in real time.
SenseTime has raised more than $1.6bn in funding in the past year, securing $620m from mobile chipmaker Qualcomm’s investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, as well as Fidelity International, Hopu Capital, Silver Lake, Tiger Global Management and unnamed others in May.
E-commerce firm Alibaba had led SenseTime’s $600m series C round just weeks earlier, investing alongside retail group Suning and the Singaporean state-owned Temasek. Qualcomm’s China Venture Fund had provided an undisclosed amount of funding in November 2017.
SenseTime had previously completed a $410m series B round in July 2017 that valued it at $1.5bn, raising cash from investors including property development conglomerate Dalian Wanda and IDG Capital, the venture capital group that reportedly backed it at series A stage.
The series B also featured CDH Investments, StarVC, Sailing Capital International, China International Capital, Co-Stone Capital, China Merchants Securities International, Morningside Venture Capital, Everbright-IDG Industrial Fund, Advantech Capital, Zhongping Guoyu Asset Management, Huarong International Financial Holdings, TCL Capital and Infore Group.