Entering China
It all starts with a financing.
The investment community has learned that the embodied intelligence start-up Dome Intelligence announced the completion of a Pre-A+ round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, led by Sequoia China, and invested by old shareholders Prosperity7 Ventures, Xiaomiao Longcheng and Puyue China. So far, the third round of financing has been completed within one year of its establishment.
Behind him are two young professors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wang Shiquan and Lu Cewu. Among them, Lu Cewu has many labels, but one of the most impressive is: he studied under Li Feifei.
Who is Li Feifei? The 48-year-old, known as the “Godmother of AI”, is an iconic figure in the field of global research on AI, and has long dominated the research of artificial intelligence at Stanford University. And the student corps she brought out is becoming the mainstay of the global AI community.
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Li Feifei, a student, lined up to announce financing
Wang Shiquan, who was born in 1988, is a native of Shantou and has been a scholar since he was a child. In 2008, he was admitted to the engineering high class of Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University. During this time, he developed a keen interest in robotic automation and later pursued his PhD at Stanford University, where he studied at the Bionic and Dexterous Operations Laboratory and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under the supervision of two leading names in the field of robotics, Professor Mark Cutkosky and Professor Oussama Khatib. Currently, he is a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Another co-founder, Lu Cewu, also has a big background. Born in 1982, he completed his studies at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2015, Lu Cewu went to the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to carry out postdoctoral research, and his supervisor was Professor Li Feifei.
Li Feifei once said in his letter of recommendation that few of his peers could reach the academic level of Lu Cewu, so he invited him to join the laboratory. During this period, Lu Cewu has published more than 20 top journal conference papers, holds more than 20 patents, and his research on humanoid climbing robots won the best paper award of IROS, the world’s top robotics conference. Today, Lu Cewu is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
In fact, as early as 2016, Wang Shiquan and three Stanford doctors set up a general intelligent robot company, Feixi Technology, and Lu Cewu was one of them. Less than 6 years after its establishment, Feixi Technology has received multiple rounds of financing from Meituan, GSR Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Yunfeng Fund and other institutions, and will become a unicorn in 2022.
If the pedestrian robot is their starting point, then the embodied intelligence integrated with the AI model is like a sea of stars. So Wang Shiquan and Lu Cewu joined forces again to establish Dome Intelligence in Shanghai in 2023.
Thanks to the precipitation in the field of general robots, Dome Intelligence has developed rapidly. In the past year, the Dome team has released the Noematrix Brain, which has initially established a product system that includes the whole process of data collection, model training, deployment and verification. At present, Dome will explore and polish the scenario application of Noematrix Brain in the fields of retail operation, logistics picking, food handling, home service and scientific research and education. It is reported that the embodied brain of Dome has received orders for 100 sets of single scenes.
Investors are also coming. In September last year, Dome Intelligent announced the completion of an angel round and Pre-A round of financing with a total of hundreds of millions of yuan. Among them, the Pre-A round of financing was co-led by investment fund Prosperity7 Ventures and GF Xinde, with participation from Zeyu Capital, Sinovation Works, MiraclePlus, Plug and Play China, and MFund Magic Amount Capital. The angel round was led by Xiaomiao Langcheng, with participation from MFund Magic Capital, Jinghai Zhanyue and SEE Fund.
This time, Dome Intelligence completed a Pre-A+ round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, led by Sequoia China, and continued to be invested by old shareholders Prosperity7 Ventures, Xiaomiao Longcheng and Puyue China. In this regard, Sequoia China said: “At this stage, entrepreneurship in the field of robot basic models requires the company to have a team of scientists who can define and evaluate key problems at each point. Lu Cewu, the founder of Dome Intelligence, is the most senior scientist in the field of embodiment in China, and the team has the closest comprehensive capabilities to the system level in this field. ”
Coincidentally, not long ago, Lingchu Intelligence completed an angel round of financing, led by Hillhouse Venture Capital and Bluerun Venture Capital. The company’s co-founder, Chen Yuanpei, is a post-00s robot obsessed scholar who studied under Karen Liu and Professor Li Feifei as a visiting scholar at Stanford.
As a result, a group of alternative entrepreneurs emerged.
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The history of the growth of the AI Queen
Many years ago, Kai-Fu Lee was asked who would influence the direction of science and technology in the next 25 years, and he thought about it and said the name Li Feifei.
Born in Beijing and raised in Chengdu, Li Feifei studied at the well-known Chengdu No. 7 Middle School. She was admitted to Princeton at the age of 23 and became a tenured associate professor at Stanford at the age of 33, a name that is now almost unknown to everyone in the AI community.
Back at the beginning of the 21st century, the field of AI was still quite unpopular. Li Feifei started the image dataset project, and in just over a year, he led the team to build an image recognition database containing 15 million images: ImageNet, which is the largest annotation database in human history. As a result, Li Feifei became famous in the field of artificial intelligence.
Later, Li Feifei took her students to explore the next stop of AI, and embodied intelligence was one of them. In 2018, Li Feifei and his team began to combine machine learning and robotic arms to set foot in the field of embodied intelligence.
In 2023, Li Feifei’s team will successively announce a number of achievements in embodied intelligence. Among them, the NOIR system decodes human EEG signals into a robot skill library that can complete tasks such as cooking sukiyaki, ironing clothes, grinding cheese, playing tic-tac-toe, and even petting a robot dog.
In January last year, she led 23 top students from prestigious universities to start a business to establish World Labs, which directly pointed to the most difficult problem to solve in the field of artificial intelligence – spatial intelligence. World Labs’ ambition is to elevate AI models from a 2D pixel plane to a full 3D world, both virtual and real, with spatial intelligence as rich as the human world.
Based on Li Feifei’s strong appeal, World Labs, which was established less than a year ago, has assembled a group of luxurious investors, almost half of the AI industry. According to the official website of World Labs, the company has raised more than 230 million US dollars (about 1.6 billion yuan) in funding, behind which there are venture capital institutions that are good at capturing AI unicorns, as well as big men in the AI rivers and lakes, and have attracted giants such as Nvidia, AMD, and Adobe to enter the game.
“New adventures are always brewing.” This female scientist is influencing generations of students.
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She brought out a student corps
Back to the field of robotics, known as the saying of “South Hunan and North Miao” – Li Zexiang, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Wang Tianmiao, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, respectively brought out a student entrepreneurship corps.
Nowadays, in the wave of AI, the “Li Feifei School” is quietly rising.
During her time at Stanford, her research interests include cognitively inspired artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotics learning, and artificial intelligence + healthcare. In addition, Li Feifei’s requirements for students are to understand both technology and scenarios. In other words, students here are not only researchers, but also product managers, developers, and entrepreneurs, which undoubtedly paves the way for future entrepreneurship.
Over the years, a large number of AI talents have come out of Li Feifei’s laboratory. For example, Wang Gang, the former head of Ali’s automatic driving. After graduating from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2005, Wang Gang joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied with Feifei Li, computer scientist David Forsyth, and Derek Hoiem.
At the age of 34, Wang Gang was already a tenured professor at Nanyang Technological University. In 2017, he resigned and became the chief scientist of Alibaba’s AI Lab, and later incubated Alibaba’s autonomous driving business. Until 2022, Wang Gang turned around and founded his own cleaning robot company, Xinsheng Intelligence. Although the project is very secretive at present, according to the shareholder information, it can be seen that it has attracted investment institutions such as Hillhouse, Lightspeed, and Pricewater Capital.
In March last year, Nvidia announced the creation of a new research division, GEAR, a universal embodied agent research lab. Surprisingly, the leaders of the laboratory are two Chinese post-90s doctors, Fan Linxi and Zhu Yuke. Fan Linxi and Zhu Yuke were both disciples of Li Feifei during their doctoral studies at Stanford University. In that year, Li Feifei’s team developed SURREAL, a robot training framework to accelerate the learning process, and Zhu Yuke and Fan Linxi were the first to write the project’s paper.
There is also Guo Wenjing, the founder of Pika, who studied for a doctorate in the AI lab of Stanford University, where Li Feifei worked, before dropping out of school to start a business. In addition, ImageNet, launched by Li Feifei, later evolved into the annual ImageNet Challenge, in which Sun Jian, former chief scientist of Megvii Technology, and Ren Shaoqing, vice president of intelligent driving R&D of Weilai, participated in and won the championship.
As far as the eye can see, many of Li Feifei’s students have entered giants such as Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Google to engage in AI-related research work. For example, Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI and former senior director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, and Li Jia, former president of Google AI China Center, etc.
Gathering is a fire, and scattering is a sky full of stars. Many students who studied under Li Feifei or were influenced by Li Feifei have devoted themselves to the AI wave. In “The Autobiography of Li Feifei”, she once described curiosity as the North Star, but also a searchlight of life, through continuous search and exploration, you will definitely find the direction you love.
This scene also verifies the sentence: behind the development of the industry, there is a huge network woven by academic elites. In the era of science and technology entrepreneurship, academic background seems to have become an invisible pass, and this group of highly educated founders is creating a magnificent era of science and technology innovation in China.
