Zhang Qian, Pearl Peng

zhqcindy@163.com

IRISH professional services company Accenture announced yesterday to have formed a strategic alliance with and made a minority investment in Malong Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup headquartered in Shenzhen.

Accenture offers Applied Intelligence practice that applies artificial intelligence and human ingenuity to help clients solve their business problems.

Malong’s product recognition and auto-tagging technology, ProductAI®, lets machines “see” physical objects the way a person does. Retailers can use it to make product checkouts much more efficient and allow their customers to shop for items by taking a picture of it with their smart phones.

The agreement, in which Malong designates Accenture as its preferred systems integrator and consulting partner, will form a cornerstone of Accenture’s growing computer vision capabilities. It will provide services and solutions to organizations in any industry where objects need to be reliably recognized at a high-level, microscopic-level, or x-ray level.

The investment in Malong is Accenture Ventures’ first investment in China.

Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture, said, “AI has been making incredible strides in advancing computer vision, as is clearly demonstrated in what Malong Technologies is now able to offer to organizations. Our alliance and investment in them ensures that Accenture and our Applied Intelligence practice will stay ahead of the curve when it comes to offering clients innovation through AI and intelligent technologies, across industries and countries.”

“Our award-winning scientific research in deep learning and computer vision has allowed us to develop an accurate, affordable, and secure cloud-based cognitive service that can deliver significant impact across many business use cases. Gaining Accenture as an investor and alliance partner will allow us to jointly bring our services to top-tier companies worldwide,” said Huang Dinglong, CEO of Malong Technologies.

Malong uses a ‘weakly-supervised’ deep learning algorithms that can be trained on much bigger data sets than most algorithms to achieve unprecedented humanlike accuracy. It won Malong the WebVision 2017 Challenge at the CVPR Computer Vision Conference with a 94.78 percent recognition rate.

Malong has been recognized in the Gartner 2018 Cool Vendors report and is the only Chinese company listed in the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2018 list.