Mininglamp, a China-based big data solution company, announced that it has completed series D funding round of CNY 2 billion led by Tencent with participation from Jintuo Capital (金拓资本), China Renaissance New Economy Fund (华兴新经济基金) and Avic Trust (中航信托). 

This round of funding will be used to complete strategic upgration of its brand. The brand name will be changed to Mininglamp Technology from Mininglamp. It has upgraded its mission to become leading one-stop AI services platform and help the landing of AI technology.

Backers' thoughts:

Tencent

Tencent has two main businesses which are gaming and investing. For the past 11 years, it has invested more than 700 companies and 122 of them are valued more than USD 1 billion. 

LIN Haifeng (林海峰), the partner at Tencent Investment Department, said Mininglamp has done well in R&D, landing business and talent acquisition and training for the past two years. Mininglamp is a strategic partnership with Tencent Cloud to solve the application problem faced by traditional business. 

China Renaissance New Economy Trust 

It is the fund set up by China Renaissance (华兴资本) in 2011, one of the leading institutional investors in China, to invest in New Economy companies. Its managed asset size is around USD 4.1 billion. Previously, it has invested in Focus Media(分众传媒), privatization of Qihoo 360 (奇虎360), Lianjia (链家), and JD Digits.

DU Yongbo (杜永波), in charge of China Renaissance New Economy Trust, said AI unicorns like SenseTime (商汤科技) and iFlytek (科大讯飞) are doing well in the sensing field; however, in the cognitive field, Mininglamp is the absolute No.1 player.

Jintuo Capital

It is a Beijing-based venture capital institution.

JIN Xiaoqiu (金晓秋), managing director at Jintuo claimed that there is no doubt about AI will be the future and there shall be several unicorns in the AI toB field and focusing on business clients. Mininglamp has many excellent showcases and expands fast in the following four focused areas such as safe & security, industry, digital city, finance etc. 

Avic Trust

YAO Jiangtao (姚江涛), director of Avic Trust, considers Mininglamp is a tech-driven company which will empower companies with its AI technology. Avic Trust would like to try out some experiments in the fintech industry. Perhaps Mininglamp could provide advanced AI knowledge and technology to help Avic to exercise its goals in the fintech industry.

Who Minginglamp serves:

The short answer is business clients. For its four main focuses, it has collaborated with more than 200 customers such as local Police Departments, Tax Department, Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Everbright Bank, CRCC (中国中车), Shanghai Metro to land AI projects.

What Minginglamp provides:

Minginglamp has just launched its Industry AI Brain 2.0 in September 2018, reported by iYiou (the Chinese site of EqualOcean). Its 2.0 system will highlight "symbol" and "cognitive". In the first aspect, Mininglamp will treat data as symbols to better extract, integrate and digest information included in the data. A more important progress has been achieved is that symbol is backed by a logical and causal relationship, against correlation relationships in the previous deep learning settings.  In the second aspect, by developing cognitive AI the system will automatically optimize decision continuously.