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China is widely known as a police state, with a wide range of surveillance networks that spies on its people without giving thought to their privacy. As such, it was only natural that a startup like SenseTime would thrive in such an environment since its business is specifically built on being the biggest tattletale to have ever existed. It recently raised $600 million during a recent fundraising round to prove this point.
Being a tech startup that spies on people isn’t the only thing that gave SenseTime an edge, either. According to a report by Bloomberg, it’s also an artificial intelligence company, which recently became the most valuable of its kind in the world.
At a valuation of $3 billion, the startup now has the capacity to aggressively expand and blanket China with its surveillance technology, significantly increasing the government’s ability to micromanage its citizens. As to how pervasive SenseTime’s ability to spy on people even is, Bloomberg put it best.
“If you’ve ever been photographed with a Chinese-made phone or walked the streets of a Chinese city, chances are your face has been digitally crunched by SenseTime software built into more than 100 million mobile devices,” Bloomberg writes.
The Chinese government is not the only major player to back the startup either as it has also partnered with Honda on the matter of driverless car technology and has even received support from Qualcomm, the mobile chip manufacturing giant, Futurism notes. As it stands, SenseTime is basically one of China’s most important pieces in dominating the budding AI industry.
As the startup’s technology continues to improve through the mountain of data that it is likely receiving from what China’s surveillance wing has already gathered, everything from who goes to school and who is leaving the country will be monitored at some point. By giving this task to an AI, it becomes more effective, especially with facial recognition becoming so sophisticated.
