Tech China Post #49

November venture capital in China reached $2B (link)

Honda is establishing a 5-year joint R&D project with China-based SenseTime, an artificial intelligent company focused on object and image recognition. SenseTime is one of the unicorns in China and has raised more than $400M in the most recent round. Honda is starting to push aggressively in autonomous vehicles and other advanced tech-enabled solutions in automotive and mobility. The company has also established partnerships with Waymo, Grab in India, and DRIVE in Israel. (link)

Ford is partnering with Alibaba to sell Ford cars online through Alibaba’s e-commerce platform. In addition to exploring online B2C distribution of cars, Ford is looking to work with Alibaba in other strategic areas such as mobility, cloud, and artificial intelligence — areas that Alibaba has invested billions to establish itself as an emerging giant. Ford, betting on China as one of its key major markets, plans to bring 50 new vehicle models to China by 2025. The company has announced multi-million dollar partnership with another Chinese company to build electric vehicles. (link)

The 4th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen saw the attendance of not only founders and CEOs of tech giants in China but also the likes of Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google. On full display at the conference are the rapidly development and also broad adoption of artificial intelligence in major aspects in Chinese society. Image recognition technology and data analytics, coupled with existing data insights from various data sources, are deployed at large scale to understand users, citizen, visitors at product, city, and national levels.