The core technology is self-controllable, and the future development of Yunzhisheng is still expected.

Recently, Yunzhisheng withdrew its application for listing of science and technology innovation board from Shanghai Stock Exchange. It is understood that the company voluntarily withdrew its IPO application this time, mainly due to the company's strategic development factors.

People who know a little about the voice industry will certainly be familiar with Yunzhisheng. As a unicorn enterprise that started with AI voice technology, Yunzhisheng started with voice interaction with the strategic thinking of "cloud-end-core", and gradually built a technology city including machine learning platform, AI chip, voice language, image and knowledge map.

The scale advantage is remarkable, and it has been favored by many well-known institutions.

Yunzhisheng was founded in June 20 12. Is an artificial intelligence enterprise that provides intelligent voice technology and comprehensive solutions for enterprises and users. At that time, AI entrepreneurship was still scarce in the industry, and deep learning was not fully mature. Even the world-famous Alpha Go Battle Li Shishi took place four years later. However, at that time, Yunzhisheng had devoted himself to the research and development of AI interactive solutions, and completed the construction of a troika including voice cloud, deep learning and supercomputing platform at the end of 20 12, taking the lead in applying deep learning to speech recognition industry services, and established a wide influence in the industry through deep and solid technical research and development.

In 20 12, Yunzhisheng took the lead in launching an open voice platform and introducing DNN into the voice field. Core-making began on 20 15, and the industry's first voice AI chip was launched on May 20 18. At the beginning of 20 19, the multi-modal AI chip strategy was released, and a joint venture company was established with Geely's technology company to develop the car-rAIl-level ai chip (all the car-rail-level verification reports have been completed); Take the lead in putting forward the "cloud-end-core" product strategy and other initiatives in the industry, so that Yunzhisheng has demonstrated its extraordinary leading ability in the industry.

Take the chip as an example. The importance of the chip naturally needs no elaboration. And "core-making" seems to have become the technical standard of AI enterprises. Yunzhisheng is naturally like this, even earlier than most enterprises.

In 20 15, the year before Alpha Dog set off the AI wave, they were the first to announce the establishment of a chip team and began to develop uDSP processors and DeepNet IP technology.

In 20 18, Yunzhisheng took the lead in delivering the artificial intelligence voice chip "Swift".

In 20 19, Snow Leopard, the standard chip for vehicles, and Hummingbird, the second upgraded chip series for home use, were launched, and the research and development of Dolphin, a multimodal interactive function chip with "image+voice", was started.

As one of the few artificial intelligence enterprises with full-chain voice interaction technology in China, Yunzhisheng has grown into a leading enterprise in this field in eight years, showing a leading trend not only in technology but also in commercialization. For a long time, the company's heavy investment in research and development has also been transformed into scale advantage with the continuous maturity of the market. From 20 17 to 20 19, Yunzhisheng's revenue was 61kloc-0/40700 yuan,197000 yuan and 2190000 yuan respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.9/kloc-.

It is worth mentioning that since its establishment, Yunzhisheng has completed several rounds of financing. On April 1 day, 2065438, Yunzhisheng completed the D round of financing, and the investors were CICC, orient securities and Qinghequan Capital. In July of 20 18, Yunzhisheng also completed the C+ round financing of 600 million yuan, which was led by China Internet Investment Fund; Series C * * * financing 1 100 million USD, the investor is Qianhai Wu Tong M&A Fund, setting a record for a single round of financing in the field of voice technology. On 20 14, the company obtained the B round of financing from Qualcomm Venture Capital and its old shareholder Qi Ming Chuangtou.

Tap the needs of market segmentation, and technology empowers life scenes.

At present, Yunzhisheng has independently developed three types of chip ip (deep learning processor chip ip, digital signal processor chip IP and image processing chip IP), which have been put into use and are being continuously optimized. Application scenarios cover voice and image interaction scenarios such as smart home, smart medical care, in-vehicle products, and educational robots.

The voice interaction scheme between hospitals and families is a product that Yunzhisheng has landed and been widely used at present. It can be seen that artificial intelligence has gradually infiltrated and changed our lives in a subtle way.

According to statistics, more than half of doctors spend more than two hours a day recording and sorting out medical records, which accounts for a very high proportion of doctors' working hours. In Peking Union Medical College Hospital, with a software and a microphone, doctors only need to dictate the diagnosis and the medical records can be automatically generated on the PC screen. This will not only help doctors improve their work efficiency, but also transform the medical record template into high-quality diagnosis and treatment data.

The emergence of this technology has greatly promoted the level of medical artificial intelligence. In family scenes, people use far-field recognition technology to control air conditioners, lights, speakers and other intelligent devices with voice, completely freeing their hands.

Yunzhisheng entered the medical field from 20 16 and accumulated profound medical professional knowledge. With the help of cooperative hospitals, freelance doctors and original natural language processing technology, Yunzhisheng has built a large-scale medical knowledge map of the whole department. In this process, the paper cooperated with Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences won the best paper of CCKS (Knowledge Mapping and Semantic Computing Conference 20 19), and the construction and application of large-scale knowledge mapping won the first prize of Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award 20 19. Yunzhisheng's medical knowledge map and related application platforms have also been purchased by many top three hospitals.

It can be seen that Yunzhisheng Southeast Headquarters, as the only enterprise in Fujian Province with the whole chain of artificial intelligence technologies such as speech recognition, super-computing ability, deep learning algorithm, big data and chip ability, is giving full play to its accumulated technical strength and resource advantages for many years and always looking for opportunities. During and even after the epidemic, enterprises stand out in the wave of technological transformation and become "boosters" for enterprise upgrading.

At the same time, it is foreseeable that once Yunzhisheng intelligent Internet of Things takes off in hotels, real estate and other fields, it will contribute a lot of income and further broaden the sources of income. It can be seen that Yunzhisheng strives to build the core and push commercialization to the ground. Therefore, you will see that the revenue structure of the self-developed chip "Swift" has been greatly improved since its listing on 20 18, which has not only achieved rapid growth, but also maintained the trend of annual growth.

In the first half of this year, thanks to the large-scale promotion of "Hummingbird" and the abandonment of low-margin products, the proportion of direct hardware procurement cost of Yunzhisheng intelligent voice interactive products fell to 26. 17%, and the gross profit margin rebounded significantly. There are various indications that after years of practice, Yunzhisheng's "cloud-end-core" strategy has been perfected into a mature logical closed loop, with the ability of rapid products facing market demand. Considering that it is no longer feasible to play concept storytelling after the big waves in the AI industry, players who play commercialization like Yun Zhisheng are more popular.

R&D continues to invest heavily, and its core skills are self-controllable.

In an era when life scenes are gradually infiltrated by AI, technology is the foundation of the company. Yunzhisheng is one of the AI enterprises that pay the most attention to skill innovation, because it knows that the self-control of core skills is the foundation of an AI enterprise. In my opinion, Yunzhisheng's skill advantage is not only related to building a team to pay attention to skills, but also inseparable from insisting on high investment in research and development.

On the one hand, the four co-founders of Yunzhisheng all have a unified skill background. Liang Jiaen, Chairman and CTO, and Kang Heng, Vice President, both graduated from Institute of Automation, China Academy of Sciences. CEO Huang Wei and Vice President Li Xiaohan have accumulated rich practical experience in Motorola and other enterprises. Build a skill-oriented team, set the main tone for the company's development, and spare no effort to recruit skilled talents. The data shows that the scale of Yunzhisheng team has exceeded 500, and there are as many as 344 development teams during the period, accounting for more than 68%.

In terms of algorithms, the company has maintained an efficient evolution speed in cutting-edge technology of machine learning and special application technology: the company took the lead in applying deep neural network (DNN) to commercial speech recognition system on 20 12, and continued to carry out the commercial practice of cutting-edge algorithms in the subsequent artificial intelligence wave. For example, the company was one of the earliest practitioners in the industry, such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), End-to-End Sequence Modeling, Generative Countermeasure Network (GAN), Attention Transformation Model (Transformer), Bidirectional Coding Representation Transformation Model (BERT), Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Self-supervised Learning (SSL).

On the other hand, Yunzhisheng has always held high skill input, and intuitive data can best explain the problem. According to the prospectus, from 20 17 to the first half of this year, the company invested 99 million yuan, 65438+52 million yuan, 258 million yuan and 92.42 million yuan respectively, accounting for 163.5%, 77.6% and1/kloc-respectively. In other words, almost all of Yunzhisheng's revenue is invested in research and development.

It is not difficult to see that Yunzhisheng is a skilled AI enterprise. In order to continue to build core skills and product systems and maintain competitiveness, it has made great efforts to develop.

The significance of the growth of an AI enterprise is, in the final analysis, not only how much high profits it can get, but how much quality improvement its technology and products can bring to people's lives, how much value it can bring to the industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and how much value it can bring to society. Benefit.

"If the sound has a shape, it must be the appearance of love." Just as Yunzhisheng's role of empowering enterprises has always been with technology, Yunzhisheng brings together a group of people with dreams and the same vision, believing that technology will change the world and that artificial intelligence will make the future life better.

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Meng Yonghui is a senior writer, columnist, special commentator, industry research expert and strategic consultant. Long-term focus on industry research, published more than 4 million words of financial and scientific articles. Support the author's source sharing, please keep the author's copyright information when reprinting, and offenders will be prosecuted.