Megvii

What Megvii is

Megvii (旷视科技) is a Chinese technology company whose work centres on computer vision, the branch of AI concerned with getting machines to detect, identify and analyse what appears in images. It was formally founded in October 2011 by Yin Qi, Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu ^[1]. All three are Tsinghua graduates, and among the Chinese computer vision companies that came to be called the "four little dragons," Megvii was the earliest to be founded ^[2]. The nickname came from a shared trait rather than a formal grouping: the four companies all grew out of computer vision ^[1].

The founding year

Megvii was set up while its founders were in different places. Yin Qi had gone to Columbia University in New York that year to begin a PhD, and coordinated with his two co-founders by phone at night ^[1]. Working at a distance and across time zones was therefore part of the company's first year, rather than something that arrived later along with overseas business.

Face++

In 2012 the company launched Face++, a face recognition cloud service platform that offered developers face detection, recognition and analysis ^[2]. The three functions are commonly described as separate steps: detection finds a face in an image, recognition works out whose face it is, and analysis reads properties from it. Delivering such functions as a cloud platform means outside developers can call them over the internet instead of building a recognition system from scratch. For a young company that is a way to reach many users without selling to each of them separately, and a way for Megvii's algorithms to end up inside other people's products.

The funding environment

Megvii's early years coincided with a rapid expansion of financing for Chinese AI startups. CVSource data cited by The Paper put AI startup financing at 1.5 billion yuan for the whole of 2013, 33.8 billion yuan in 2017, and 40.2 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2018 alone ^[1]. Policy was part of the backdrop: the State Council's AI development plan in 2017 helped drive large capital inflows into the AI industry ^[1]. For a field in which research has to be paid for before it turns into a product, the pace of financing shapes how quickly teams can grow and how many lines of work can be pursued at the same time.

October 2019

In October 2019 Megvii was one of eight commercial groups focused on facial recognition and AI that were added to a US blacklist ^[3]. The company said it strongly opposed the decision, describing it as lacking any factual basis, and said that it complies with data privacy and security policies and with local laws ^[3]. It also said it would formulate a comprehensive plan to deal with the situation ^[3].

Where it sits

On a timeline, Megvii's position is straightforward: it was the first of the four little dragons to be founded ^[2], and in 2012 it opened face recognition to outside developers through a cloud platform ^[2]. Its history also runs through the wider funding cycle of the Chinese AI industry, from the smaller sums of 2013 to the surge after 2017 ^[1], and then to the US blacklist in 2019 ^[3]. Those three stretches — an academic start, a capital boom, and cross-border restrictions — are the markers by which the company is usually described.