Langboat, an artificial intelligence enterprise incubated by Sinovation Ventures, has recently completed its Pre-A Round of financing of nearly RMB 100 million led by Lenovo Capital & Eight Roads Capital and participated by Sinovation Ventures. This round of financing is mainly used for the development of core products and forward-looking research of natural language processing (NLP).
Langboat is a cognitive intelligence company that provides business insight products based on NLP for the business digital transformation. Since its establishment one year ago, Langboat has successively obtained three rounds of financing. Previously, the Company completed the seed and angel rounds of financing led by the Sinovation Ventures AI Institute and the Sinovation Frontier Technology Fund, respectively.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, said: "over the past two years, we have conducted worldwide technological research and witnessed the rising of a new technology called 'self-supervised learning.' It is predicted that the natural language understanding will be taken by this technology to the next level and beyond, even surpassing the level of human-level understanding. This potential breakthrough is of great significance to me as someone who has been working in the field of natural language since nearly 40 years ago. Sinovation Ventures has discovered and assisted the world-class NLP scientist, Dr. ZHOU Ming, in this field and incubated Langboat from 0 to 1 through multi-dimensional startup enabling services. Meanwhile, Langboat has also made beyond expectations achievements in many aspects from technological breakthroughs to commercial proof of concepts in just one year after its establishment. We look forward Langboat to becoming a top company in the global NLP field step by step."
Dr. ZHOU Ming, the founder and CEO of Langboat pointed out that "At present, both from the perspective of major technological breakthroughs in the pre-training model and the national incentive policies for innovation and entrepreneurship, the key & core technology-based entrepreneurship shows a momentum of vigorous development. It can be said that 'it is the right time for deep technology-based entrepreneurships'. Huge business opportunities are provided in the field from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence. Transitioning from a scientist to an entrepreneur, I will lead Langboat team to build a new generation of cognitive intelligence platforms focusing on NLP, so as to help the mass working population greatly improve their ability of information acquisition, search, translation, analysis and judgment, business prediction, report generation, and decision-making."
Mr. REN Bobing, the Executive Director of Sinovation Ventures and General Manager of Frontier Technology Fund pointed out that the goal of the "Sinovation Frontier Technology Fund" is to become the first-round investor and long-term friend of science and deep tech entrepreneurs. Since its establishment, Sinovation Frontier Technology Fund has completed the blueprint of many breakthrough technological innovation projects. In the future, it will continue exploring the global market of deep technology around AI, life science, new energy, and other fields. Langboat is an important milestone incubated by Sinovation Ventures, and we look forward to the industry adoption of intelligence applications from Dr. ZHOU Ming's team aiming to expand cognitive intelligence possibilities for the business world. We believe that they will obtain great achievements in 2022."
Last October, Langboat created the open-source of the lightweight Mencius Chinese pre-trained model. And last July, the model refreshed the authoritative Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) List of the previous 10-billion and 100-billion parameter models with one billion parameters. The new generation of Mencius Cognitive Service Engine also stood out from the 4018 projects and 5077 entrepreneurial talents of 48 countries and regions in the HICOOL2021 Global Entrepreneurship Competition held in Beijing and was granted the first prize, ranking first in AI and financial track. Mencius Model is based on the research route of lightweight and efficient training and gives full play to the potential of the model under the existing parameters, which is conducive to the rapid and low-cost business scenario commercial applications.
Chen Jining (middle), Deputy Secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee and Mayor of Beijing is presenting the first prize of the HICOOL2022 Global Entrepreneurship Competition. The second person from the left is Dr. Zhou Ming, the founder of Langboat.
At present, Mencius Model has been successfully implemented in many fields and derived a number of industry-leading products, including machine translation, text generation, industry search, etc. At present, Langboat is cooperating with Transn to empower the translation industry and help Transn improve its international language competitiveness. Meanwhile, Langboat successfully launched its first cooperative product "Contentnote Intelligent Copywriter" at the end of last year by cooperating with Contentnote, a subsidiary of DataStory. In addition, Langboat also signed strategic cooperation agreements with the leading enterprises, such as Huawei Cloud and Straight Flush, in the industry to jointly create business value in the era of "Industry + AI".
Dr. ZHOU Ming, the founder of Langboat, is a top AI scientist and a representative figure in the field of NP in the world. He is now the Vice President of China Computer Federation, the Executive Member of China Information Processing Society of China, and the Chief Scientist of Sinovation Ventures. He was the Vice President of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and the President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The core team members of Langboat graduated from well-known universities such as Peking University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Beijing Jiaotong University, or worked in famous technology companies such as Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud.