CloudWalk, an artificial intelligence enterprise, was officially listed on the Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market) on Friday. During its first day of trading, its share price rose 56% to 24 yuan ($3.58) per share before settling at a closing price of 21.4 yuan and a current market value of 15.85 billion yuan. CloudWalk was born in a laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founder Zhou Xi graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2011, Zhou returned to China to set up an AI team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2015, he founded CloudWalk.

China's startup ecosystem, which produced several world-leading companies, has been in the news in the recent past about the impact of the government regulations on the big technology firms. However, despite the regulatory shakeups and the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding, China has emerged as a powerhouse for artificial intelligence (AI) unicorns, according to Thematic Research at GlobalData, a leading data, and analytics company. GlobalData's research shows that of the total of 45 AI unicorns globally, China has the biggest share with 19 unicorns headquartered in the country. These 19 unicorns are collectively valued at $43.5bn. Priya Toppo, Analyst of Thematic Research at GlobalData, comments: "China is a leading player in AI, with a number of established companies such as Baidu, Hikvision, iFlytek, Tencent, and Alibaba. The country also has a strong AI startup ecosystem, which is evident from the large number of AI unicorns (privately held startup valued at $1bn or more)."

A report from the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveals the accuracy of various facial recognition algorithms. Higher numbers are better as they indicate a lower prevalence of false positives. The "N" values represent the number of individuals enrolled in each simulation of aircraft boarding. The N 42,000 simulation, for example, is designed to represent an airport security line where many people are expected. The "k" values give the number of images of each en- rollee in each gallery.

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch's China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. Despite the geopolitical headwinds for foreign tech firms to enter China, many companies, especially those that find a dependable partner, are still forging ahead. For this week's roundup, I'm including a conversation I had with Prophesee, a French vision technology startup, which recently got funding from Kai-Fu Lee and Xiaomi, along with the usual news digest. Like many companies working on futuristic, cutting-edge tech in Europe, Prophesee was a spinout from university research labs. Previously, I covered two such companies from Sweden: Imint, which improves smartphone video production through deep learning, and Dirac, an expert in sound optimization.

In early 2018, one of Malaysia's key security forces made a startling announcement. The Auxiliary Force, a branch of the Royal Malaysia Police Cooperative, had entered into a partnership with the Chinese company Yitu Technology to equip the Force's officers with facial-recognition capabilities. Security officials will be able to rapidly compare images caught by live body cameras with images from a central database. The head of the Auxiliary Force explained that this use of artificial intelligence (AI) was a "significant step forward" in efforts to improve public security. He also noted that his agency planned eventually to enhance the body-camera system so as to enable "real-time facial recognition and instant alerts to the presence of persons of interest from criminal watch lists."1

A staff member displays a DJI Phantom 3 4K drone during CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It may come as a surprising fact that there are now 14 Chinese AI companies valued at $1 billion or more. These unicorns are worth a combined $40.5 billion, according to a report China Money Network recently released during the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos gathering in Beijing. Just to put these numbers in perspective. Google bought DeepMind for over $500 million in 2014. Chinese voice recognition giant iFlytek Co. has a market capitalization of 63 billion yuan ($9.2 billion). Chinese AI startups raised $27.7 billion via 369 VC deals in 2017, according to a recent report from Tsinghua University. So naturally, it raises questions on if there is a bubble waiting to pop in the Chinese AI space. How could these companies, with an average age of less than five years, be worth so much money?