Yitu Technology

What Yitu is

Yitu Technology is a Chinese company that grew out of computer vision, the field concerned with getting computers to interpret images and video. It was founded in September 2012 by Zhu Long and Lin Chenxi.^[1] A second account of the company's history also dates its founding to 2012 and names the same two people as founders, describing Lin Chenxi as Zhu Long's friend.^[2]

Where the founders came from

Zhu Long was trained as a statistician. He had studied for a PhD in statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his doctoral adviser was Alan Yuille, described as a computer vision pioneer and as a student of the physicist Stephen Hawking.^[1] Zhu Long decided in 2011 to return to China to start a company^[1], at a time when he was still a researcher at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.^[2]

Lin Chenxi came from a different direction: large-scale computing systems. Before the two founded Yitu, he had been building Alibaba Cloud's "Feitian", described as China's first self-developed distributed computing platform; he worked on Feitian before completing that work and going on to co-found Yitu.^[1]

The pairing matters because the two backgrounds answer different kinds of problem. Computer vision is about extracting usable information from images; a distributed computing platform is about spreading one very large computation across many machines so that it can be finished at all. A company that wants to run vision models over large volumes of data needs both.

The "CV four little dragons"

Yitu belongs to a group of four companies that grew out of computer vision and were collectively called the "CV four little dragons" — alongside Megvii, SenseTime and CloudWalk.^[1][2] The label sorts the four by their shared technical origin; it does not imply any formal tie between them. The phrase borrows an old nickname for a group of fast-growing economies and applies it to a cluster of companies.

In their early years the four "initially favoured security or financial-sector business", at a time when the AI industry was still largely a blank slate and offered them ample room to grow.^[1] Security and finance have something in common: the tasks are concrete — establishing who a person is, or handling a transaction — and a system that can read images or work through large amounts of data has a clear job to do in them.

Where it sits

Yitu was set up in September 2012, early in what the same account describes as a blank-slate period for the AI industry.^[1] One of its founders was a statistics researcher trained in vision, the other an engineer of distributed systems. That combination says something about how companies of this wave were assembled: out of academic research groups on one side and large internet platforms on the other.

Much of what is publicly recalled about Yitu is bound up with this collective label. The company is usually introduced as one of the four, and the four are usually introduced together, because they entered the same field at the same moment and took on the same kinds of customers.^[1][2]