Tianrang Intelligence Gets $26 Million in Series A Funding
Shanghai-based Tianrang Intelligence announced today that it has secured over US$26 million in Series A funding led by CMB International Capital and Gaorong Capital, with Ziniu Fund and Wacai Technology also participating. The two-year-old startup is working on general artificial intelligence solutions and will use the new funding to create a “City Brain Lab.”
Tianrang has already shown its abilities in the challenging board game Go. In a December 2017 competition its Go bot ranked 3rd, closely behind Tencent’s Fine Art and DeepZenGo; and in May the bot dispatched South Korean Go master Junghwan Park. Because Tianrang lacks the algorithm training power of tech giants like Google and Tencent, it created a deep reinforcement learning platform to allocate computing resources and deal with errors automatically. The novel platform and training techniques allowed Tianrang to reach professional Go levels with only about 1/100th of the computational power used by other teams.
Over the past two years, Tianrang has focused on digital marketing powered by its deep reinforcement learning platform. Tianrang customers’ sales improved over 58 percent during last year’s “Singles Day” November 11 online shopping extravaganza in China. Tianrang is also involved in the education and finance sectors.
Tianrang CEO Guirong Xue says the company will leverage its platform and experiences from Go and digital marketing in the creation of its “City Brain.” The project aims to accelerate machine intelligence deployment in urban environments for example by optimizing traffic flow factors to improve average vehicle speed.
Xue believes AI will ultimately power most industries, becoming as important in our daily lives as electricity and gasoline.
Author: Alex Chen | Editor: Michael Sarazen
Follow us on Twitter @Synced_Global for more AI updates!.
Subscribe to Synced Global AI Weekly to get insightful tech news, reviews and analysis! Click here !
