Seven-year-old Megvii did just that. In early 2019, Megvii got a new logo, upgraded from “Face++ Megvii”. At the same time, Megvii also released hetu, the industry’s first robot network, as a value creator that can empower the logistics, manufacturing and retail industries.
There was a time when the AI circuit was a red sea and Megvii was still a little-known startup. Later, the constant refinement of its algorithms helped it stand out from many of the tech giants. As a result, megvii, a startup, gradually became a tech unicorn.
In the past seven years, vii has won numerous scientific and technological honors, such as Top10 of the most innovative enterprises in China by Fast Company, 11th of the smartest companies in the world by MIT TR, and 25 international ai competitions.
The technological achievements of Megvii have accelerated the implementation of megvii, from facial payment to industrial robots.
Megvii, which is growing and evolving, proves that technology and the ability to improve technology can create special value in this era.
Now, after upgrading Megvii technology, what kind of qualitative changes will it face? Behind this qualitative change, what new vision does Megvii have?
From algorithm to operating system, Megvii continues to strengthen its core capabilities
Megvii’s upgrade has two obvious focuses: one is the technical aspect, from the Face++ platform to the systematic AI algorithm engine Brain++; Second, in terms of scenes, vertical scenes such as city management, logistics, retail, real estate, mobile phone and finance have been upgraded to three IoT scene business groups: city brain, supply chain brain and personal life brain.
From the technical point of view, face recognition platform to algorithm engine upgrade, is essentially vertical algorithm to comprehensive system upgrade. At the capacity level, the system obviously includes algorithms. Clearly, Megvii wants to be more than just an algorithm service provider, but to extend to a more systematic one-stop service solution.
From the scene, the upgraded scene classification is more concentrated and more inclusive. Although several vertical scenarios are concentrated into three business groups of scenarios, it cannot be ignored that these three service scenarios have a strong demand for intelligent upgrading, and the current technology can meet such demand.
From algorithms to operating systems, from vertical scenes to rich cross-border formats, this is not only an upgrade of Megvii technology and strategy, but also a placeholder upgrade to show business competitiveness. The smart thing about Megsight is that AIoT’s technology-driven upgrade has always been about algorithms, its core competency. From the strategic point of view, such a way of upgrading is to enhance, will be good at further strengthening, in the face of competition, but also more skilled.
What is megvii’s thinking behind this upgrading thinking?
Megvii believes that core competence is business value. This can well explain this upgrade, namely megvii to improve its core capabilities, is to improve their output of commercial value to customers. This also indirectly proves that the reinforcement of Megvii’s core competence is the amplification of its commercial value.
This is not surprising. If you look at megvii’s methodology in the past seven years, you will find that megvii has always been good at one to many, from single dimension to multi-dimension, but today, Megvii has applied it to the whole range of technologies and products.
At present, such upgrading idea will indeed make Megvii’s core capabilities more mature. On the one hand, it is reflected in the expansion of service scope. Systematic service is more attractive than single algorithm service, and integrated upstream and downstream service is more marketable than split service. On the other hand, it is reflected in the service capability. The system customization service with algorithm as the core is more flexible and easier to scale.
Since Megvii aims to build a stronger core capability, what is the technical core of this strong core capability? How does Megvii create its unique technological competitiveness on the AI and IoT track where experts gather?
Megvii’s two magic weapons: AI engine and IoT OS
As a matter of fact, enterprises in manufacturing, logistics and retail industries are mostly traditional and complex at present, which require technological transformation.
That’s why Megvii is launching its robot operating system, Rivermap. Like Megvii, River Map is the core of AI and IoT. In other words, river Map is megvii’s industrialized practice of AI and IoT.
Previously, Ren Zhiwei, vice president of Megvii, summed up hetu’s core values in two simple words: connectivity and empowerment. There are two core technologies, AI engine and IoT OS, that are essential for connecting things and enabling systems to industries.
AI is the secret of Megvii’s fortune, and along with the upgrading of megvii’s brand, the AI engine of Megvii has also moved to the point of qualitative change.
On the one hand, the river map itself integrates AIoT’s service capabilities. As an algorithm engine, AI plays a core and frequent role in it.
From the perspective of manufacturing industry, the existence of AI engine can bring production efficiency and quality addition for enterprises or production lines, which can radiate to production capacity, and then radiate to the whole market, and bring long-term benefits for enterprises. In the logistics industry, AI engines can break through the biggest pain points of efficiency in the industry. For example, Megvii and its partners improved the efficiency of the robot warehouse on Tmall supermarket by 40%.
On the other hand, the further improvement of AI engine’s self-evolution ability can bring continuous cost reduction and efficiency enhancement benefits for the whole industry from the macro level, and substantial benefits for production cycle and matching accuracy from the micro level.
For example, in the manufacturing industry, after a period of homework learning, AI engine will improve the accuracy of production cycle prediction, so that enterprises can take precautions, and the probability of insufficient capacity and excess capacity will be greatly reduced. In the logistics industry, AI’s self-evolution will help companies virtually increase machine sorting time, or reduce the cost of machine labor.
For a IoT of core operating system, from the content and content to connect the concept of this level, it not only can be spread will not regular production network into an orderly operation of the network, and from the perspective of the reform of industry production practices, it is a fundamental change, is to push the industry to a new era of an accelerator.
On the one hand, from the perspective of function, the Seamless Iot can realize the mutual efficient and immediate demand connection of multiple roles such as devices, robots and sensors, which is the foundation for the production and operation to step into the stage of high efficiency.
On the other hand, from the perspective of mode, the combination of hardware and software in the iot mode can not only make the production line, storage sorting machine matrix, etc. realize information and digitization, but also form a mutually optimized connection network with stronger synchronization.
In this way, AI engines and IoT operating systems have their respective roles to play, and the combination of them into AIoT is the fundamental tool that Megvii uses to empower multiple industries.
As Megvii sees it: “In this system, we want to connect more iot devices, with the aim of providing customers with closed-loop value. The valuable solution to be delivered at AIoT and in any era must be a combination of soft and hard.”
Megvii AIoT multi-scene landing drive
Light has the technology, but if can’t land, to say that is not mature, to say that is not playing rogue.
Therefore, Megvii has always had a standard for the application of technology: when it can solve specific industrial or personal problems, megvii will push the technology into reality.
As Megvii believes, “On the one hand, we hope to lead and work with many partners to create a combination of soft and hard solutions that can reduce cost and increase efficiency to realize customer value; On the one hand, we focus on core algorithm genes and continue to build an operating system that can connect to more devices and realize product value.”
For this brand upgrade and the new AIoT system, Megvii has a very clear purpose in service scenes: personal life scenes with smart devices as the core, urban brain scenes with city sensors as the core, and supply chain brain scenes including intelligent manufacturing (logistics and retail).
All of these scenarios require the empowerment of AIoT ecology. Whether in terms of personal consumption experience or enterprise commercialization ability, the embedding of AIoT is a catalyst for qualitative change.
Megvii knew this, so it wanted the AIoT operating system in each of its scenes to land as soon as possible, empowering each character in the scene.
Of course, Megvii is not without confidence. In the era of algorithms, It has a big say in the implementation of technology. For example, its online facial authentication system has served more than 400 million people. Its urban management programs have been implemented in more than 260 cities; Its smart terminal solutions already cover more than 70% of the Android phone market…
What’s more, in the past seven years, Megvii has accumulated a very rich partner ecosystem, such as Alibaba, Ant Financial, Cainiao, Huawei, Lenovo… That means megvii has ten or even a hundred times more penetration.
Now, the launch of AIoT system will undoubtedly help Megvii achieve a more ambitious implementation scale. From personal life to manufacturing to logistics, Megvii will continue to replicate this mature AIoT system into hundreds of millions of terminal devices and production lines.
A fully permeated AIoT era is accelerating towards us. Megvii, like the algorithm era, still uses technology to drive all changes from the inside out. Only this time, megvii’s drive is more comprehensive and mature.
Article/Liu Kuang, ID: Liukuang110, this article is published on Kuang Venture Capital website