SenseTime, one of China's most valued unicorns, enters into a strategic alliance with Abu Dhabi, becoming another AI company to cooperate with the city.
SenseTime, one of China's most valued unicorns, enters into a strategic alliance with Abu Dhabi, becoming another AI company to cooperate with the city.
SenseTime will set up an EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Artificial Intelligence R&D center in Abu Dhabi, United Arabian Emirates this year to support the AI development in multiple industries including healthcare, remote sensing and education.
The deal is signed at the 35th Anniversary of the Diplomatic Relations Establishment between the UAE and China. After operating offices in Japan and Singapore, SenseTime now expands to EMEA, moving one step further as a part of Chinese AI going global.
China's Sogou, known for its Search engine and Pinyin input method, also worked with Abu Dhabi Media (ADM) in developing the first Arabic-speaking AI News Anchor, following the cooperation with the UAE Minister of State for Artifical Intelligence. Listed on NYSE, Sogou's IPO raised USD 585 million to improve its AI capabilities.
Abu Dhabi has been actively investing in the tech sector, especially focusing on AI development. One of the largest state-owned investment funds, Mubadala has invested in SenseTime and Didi Chuxing in 2017. One subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund also backed Megvii, whose face recognition technology is used on Alipay and DiDi platforms, in its latest funding round in May.
Last October, Abu Dhabi announces its five-year smart city and AI plan, Zayed Smart City Project (2018-2022).
SenseTime specializes in deep learning-enabled computer vision technologies. So far, it has developed businesses in security, autonomous driving, remote sensing, mobile entertainment areas, healthcare and so on. The tech company also publishes several AI textbooks for Chinese high school students.