中国国有基金大举投资人脸识别初创企业

Chinese facial recognition start-up Megvii Face++ has raised $460m in an investment round led by a government fund, as the country pours money into efforts to become an artificial intelligence superpower to rival the US.

中国企业旷视科技(Megvii)旗下的人脸识别技术平台Face++已在一轮由一支政府基金主导的投资中筹资4.6亿美元，中国正大举投资于研发人工智能技术，以期在该领域成为与美国抗衡的超级大国。

The Beijing-based Face++ said on Wednesday that it had raised money from China State-Owned Venture Capital Fund and the China-Russian Investment Fund, which is backed by the sovereign wealth funds of both countries. Private investors including Alibaba’s payments affiliate Ant Financial also participated.

总部位于北京的Face++周三表示，他们已获得中国国有资本风险投资基金(China State-Owned Venture Capital Fund )及由中俄两国主权财富基金支持的中俄投资基金(China-Russian Investment Fund)的投资。阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的支付业务关联公司蚂蚁金服(Ant Financial)等私人投资者也参与了投资。

Face++, which had a valuation of Rmb10bn ($1.5bn) before its recent round of investment, declined to reveal its post-fundraising valuation.

在最近一轮投资前，Face++的估值为100亿元人民币(合15亿美元)，该公司拒绝透露其在本轮筹资后的估值。

The company is benefiting from a plan laid out this year by China’s State Council to become the world’s unchallenged leader in AI research and applications by 2030, and a subsequent push by government-run venture capital funds to support domestic start-ups.

该公司得益于中国国务院今年出台的一项计划，即到2030年成为人工智能研究与应用领域的世界绝对领先者，也得益于由政府运营的风投基金随后对国内初创企业的大力支持。

According to KPMG, the government has invested more than $1bn to date in early-stage funding for young start-ups.

毕马威(KPMG)表示，迄今为止，中国政府已为年轻的初创企业提供了超过10亿美元的前期资金。

“Investment from the ‘national team’ [state-owned funds] means Face++ will receive much more policy support from the government, which will greatly benefit their development,” said Leng Biao, professor of body recognition at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

“来自‘国家队’(国有基金)的投资意味着Face++将会获得政府更多的政策支持，这将对他们的发展大有助益，”北京航空航天大学(Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics)从事人体识别研究的教授冷彪表示。

“But there are risks too, because national-team funding comes with restrictions on who can invest in them in future.”

“但也存在风险，因为国家资金注入带有对未来投资者身份的限制。”

Face++ is pioneering technologies that are used by mobile payments company Ant Financial, which is trialling its software to let customers pay with scanning their face. It is talking to banks about the use of its software in their branches.

Face++是移动支付公司蚂蚁金服使用的一系列技术的开拓者，目前该公司正在测试一种能够让顾客通过面部扫描完成支付的软件。目前Face++正与多家银行讨论将这一软件应用到他们的分行。

Last week, the Chinese start-up beat teams from Google, Facebook and Microsoft in tests of image recognition at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Italy, the industry’s major worldwide gathering.

上周，在意大利举行的业界主要全球会议——国际计算机视觉大会(International Conference on Computer Vision)上，这家中国初创公司在图像识别测试中打败了谷歌(Google)、Facebook和微软(Microsoft)的团队。

But Face++ also is helping China’s police automatically track the country’s 1.3bn citizens and identify them in surveillance footage. “We want to build the eyes and brain of the city, to help police analyse vehicles and people to an extent beyond what is humanly possible,” the company said.

但Face++也在帮助中国警方自动追踪中国的13亿公民，并在监控视频中识别出他们。“我们希望建立城市的眼睛和大脑，超出人为可能地帮助警方分析车辆和人员，”该公司表示。

The use of AI allows police to trace a target across multiple cameras in different locations. The government aims to be able to predict crimes before they happen by analysing patterns of movement.

运用人工智能(AI)能让警方通过不同位置的多个摄像头追踪同一个目标。政府力求有能力通过分析活动规律来预测犯罪行为。

“Every prefecture’s municipal police department [of which China has 294] has invested at least Rmb100m each into their facial-recognition surveillance systems,” Mr Leng added.

“每个地级市公安机关(中国有294个地级市)都至少对面部识别监控系统投资1亿元人民币，”冷彪补充道。

Unlike fingerprinting or retinal scans, facial recognition software can analyse targets without their knowledge.

与指纹或者视网膜扫描不同，面部识别软件能够在目标不知情的情况下分析他们。

Since AI technologies require data to learn from, Face++ benefits from training its algorithms on China’s vast pool of cheaply available data — and from more relaxed privacy laws on the mainland.

由于人工智能技术需要通过数据来学习，Face++受益于能够利用中国海量廉价数据来训练其算法，还受益于中国内地更宽松的隐私法律。

Its software can recognise people without them having given the company any information, since it links up to China’s national photo identification database of more than 1bn records — the largest in the world.

其软件能够识别出没有向该公司提供任何信息的人，因为其连接到拥有超过10亿条记录的中国国家照片识别数据库——后者是世界同类数据库中最大的。

Face++ opened its first overseas lab in Seattle in July, and poached Wang Jue, a principal scientist at Adobe, to head it. The company says it hopes to expand globally in future.

Face++今年7月在西雅图建立了首个海外研究院，并从Adobe挖走首席科学家王珏来领导这个研究院。该公司表示，希望未来能在全球扩张。

Additional reporting by Yingzhi Yang Yingzhi Yang补充报道