As the smart speaker industry continues to develop, Baidu has made a strategic investment in Little Fish.
Baidu has recently begun to finalize an acquisition agreement that will make it the sole owner of home hardware terminal manufacturer 'Little Fish' (Chinese name is Xiaoyu Zaijia), at an amount of several hundred million dollars. There are still details to be completed for the final agreement.
Little Fish is a technologically innovative enterprise dedicated to building smart home hardware terminals and services. In January 2017, Little Fish announced a strategic cooperation with Baidu. In April 2018, Baidu successively led Xiaoyu's series C round and series C+ rounds of financing.
The merger of the Baidu smart living group (SLG) and this smart voice producer was actually completed last year. In February 2019, Qian Chen officially joined Baidu, becoming responsible for hardware R&D and supply chain ecology in Baidu's SLG. Previously, he was responsible for Little Fish's hardware R&D and supply chain center.
The integration of Baidu SLG systems and Little Fish has finally been settled, transitioning from the initial business merger to whole-ownership acquisition. Next, Baidu will compete with Alibaba's Tmall Genie and Xiaomi's Xiao AI in the smart voice field.