YITU picks up $100M in new funding round

Jul 16, 2018 | Stephen Mayhew

Chinese facial recognition software developer YITU Technology has received a new C+ round investment of US$100 million from China Industrial Asset Management Ltd.

The China-based AI company announced the news today. The $100 million is in addition to the $200 million raised from new investors ICBC International and SPDB International announced in June. The investor is a firm under the Industrial Bank Co. Ltd. that specializes in private equity investment.

According to a company statement, the financial expertise of the new investors will help YITU to expand its reach in related sectors.

In June YITU Technology took first place on the NIST facial recognition testing leaderboard for the second year in a row. They beat out a pair of other Chinese organizations and a pair of Russian organizations, which rounded out the top five in the latest NIST Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Ongoing.

In an interview with Biometric Update earlier this year the company revealed that it is expanding its Silicon Valley research lab as the company continues to raise its international profile. YITU AI Research Scientist Dr. Wu Shuang said the company has a wide range of applications of its convolutional neural network technology in various stages of development.