CHINESE facial recognition technology developer SenseTime Group Ltd., the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup, plans to sustain growth by expanding globally and diving deeper into arenas from autonomous cars to health care.

The firm counts education, self-driving vehicles as well as surgery and diagnostics among areas ripe for commercializing artificial intelligence, managing director Esther Wong said.

It’s now actively seeking out investments in fellow startups that can benefit from its own technology, she told the Bloomberg Invest Asia forum in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Investors are handing billions of dollars to Chinese artificial intelligence startups from SenseTime to Face++, hoping to ride a wave of support from a government intent on becoming the world leader in the technology by 2030.

SenseTime, last valued at more than US$4.5 billion, is said to be aiming to raise new funds this year. Wong declined to comment on that.

The startup specializes in systems that analyze faces and images on an enormous scale and works with retailers and health care researchers but not directly with the Chinese government, Wong said.

The company has been profitable for two years and has grown to 3,000 people, of which a third work in research, she said. SenseTime is based in Hong Kong and the mainland, with offices in Japan and Singapore and plans for more internationally.

“The topline has been growing at triple digits for the past four years. Now that we have a bigger base, it probably won’t be as high going forward,” Wong said. “Even though we’re a startup, the founding team has been doing artificial intelligence for almost three decades.”

Wong said SenseTime’s 200 AI scientists will prove invaluable in spotting investment opportunities beyond the dozen or so startups it’s already backed.

The firm’s over-arching goal is to get AI in front of a swathe of industries and as many people as possible, using data to generate the requisite algorithm via machine learning, she said.

(SD-Agencies)