Chinese AI unicorn Unisound (云知声) reportedly has signed IPO advisory agreement with CICC, seeking to be listed on SEE STAR. Based on voice technology, the company expanded to healthcare, smart home, education and automobile areas.
According to Chinese Media IPO Zaozhidao (literally, "IPO in advance"), Chinese AI unicorn Unisound (云知声) signed IPO advisory agreement with CICC, seeking to be listed on SEE STAR.
Founded in 2012, the AI company started the business focusing on Speech recognition and Natural Language Processing utilizing deep neural network algorithms. In 2015, the team realized the importance of terminal devices and started to expand its technological capability scope to computing power. In May 2018, the AI specialist released its voice AI chips “Yuyan” (雨燕) used for IoT scenarios.
Based on voice technology, the company expanded to healthcare, smart home, education and automobile areas.
"Integration of software and hardware is a better business model but compared with image recognition, Voice recognition has relatively fewer use case scenarios and fewer monetization abilities," said Shang Yang, senior analyst at EqualOcean.
Unisound has cooperated with over 500 hospitals in providing voice assistant to help doctors with filing Electronic Health Record (EHR), including one of the most renowned Peking Union Medical College Hospital. It closed a CNY 4 million deal of EHR audio solutions with Zhengzhou Central Hospital in May 2018.
In smart home area, it closely cooperated with home appliance manufacturers such as Gree, Midea and Haier. The AI voice specialist also provides spoken English testing services to education giants such as New Oriental and Tal Education Group, charging based on the number of API calls. Besides, it also provides automobile
In voice recognition area, it’s commonly recognized that iFLYTEK is one of the leading players in China. In Q1 2019, it released revenue of CNY 1.96 billion with net income around CNY 30 million. It’s government subsidy amounted CNY 84 million in the first quarter of 2019.
So far, Unisound has secured series D round of financing of an undisclosed amount this April. The total amount financed in series C is CNY 1.3 billion. Evergrande Research Institute reported that Unisound’s valuation is upward of USD 1.2 billion.