By Wang Yutong, Edited by Cheng Manqi
August 8, 2023, 23:08 UTC
Shanghai, China – Mita Technology, an AI search company, has successfully completed a new round of financing exceeding 100 million RMB, led by Ant Group, with participation from Lightspeed China Partners. The post-investment valuation of Mita Technology has reached 150 million USD. This latest investment marks Ant Group’s sixth AI-related investment in the past year, highlighting the company’s strategic focus on the AI sector.
According to an exclusive report by LatePost, Mita Technology has been approached by several large tech companies, including Baidu and Tencent, during this funding round. However, it was Ant Group that ultimately struck a deal with the AI firm. The company’s growing portfolio in AI now includes major players such as Zhipu AI, Yuezhi Dark Side, Aishu Technology, Shengshu Technology, MoXin Semiconductor, and Mita Technology.
Mita Technology, known for its AI search capabilities, has previously attracted investments from Mingshi Capital,Liebao Mobile, and Fengyuan Capital. The company’s founder, Min Kerui, is a serial entrepreneur with a rich background in the tech industry. Min co-founded natural language technology provider Boson Data in 2012, serving as the CTO before the company was acquired by Ant Group in 2015. In 2017, Min joined LeShi Mobile as Chief Scientist before founding Mita Technology in April 2018.
Mita Technology has introduced several products aimed at professionals, including Mita Translate, an AI-powered legal translation tool, Mita Writing Cat, a proofreading and correction tool, and Quantum Swift, an article generation product launched in 2022. The latter achieved over 10,000 daily active users within a week of its launch. However, despite these offerings, Mita did not benefit from the investment frenzy that favored top AI companies last year.
The turning point for Mita came in March of this year when the company officially launched its AI search product, Mita AI Search. In the same month, the website’s traffic exceeded 7 million visits. According to Similar Web, Mita Search ranked third among Chinese AI products in March, trailing only Baidu’s Wenxin Yanyan and Yuezhi Dark Side Kimi. The company’s growth rate reached an impressive 550% that month, all while operating at a smaller scale than larger tech giants and even some well-funded AI model companies.
Min Kerui, who holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Fudan University, a master’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believes that AI is not just about brilliant ideas but more about engineering ingenuity. There aren’t too many sophisticated ideas in AI; it’s more about clever engineering, like the Vision Transformer (ViT), which essentially involves ‘slicing’: breaking down the long sequence of an image into short sequences, allowing the use of the standard Transformer architecture for subsequent operations, Min explained.
不同于 Perplexity, which focuses on applications rather than models, Mita Technology uses its proprietary models but with smaller parameters. Billions-scale models are a burden on costs, and in applications, we want them to be as small as possible, not the opposite, Min stated last year.
The AI search market has seen significant activity this year, with Microsoft integrating OpenAI’s chatbot into its Bing search engine in March, followed by Google’s AI search feature in May. Major Chinese tech companies, including Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, Zhipu AI, Yuezhi Dark Side Kimi, and others, have also launched their AI search features. OpenAI further entered the market with its SearchGPT product at the end of July.
The optimism surrounding AI search is rooted in the belief that with the stabilization of large-scale model technology, AI application products are set to explode. Search, as the most essential刚需 (urgent need) scenario on the internet, represents a colossal market. Google’s search advertising revenue alone reached 210 billion USD last year, indicating the vast potential for AI to revolutionize search.
Mita Technology’s latest funding round not only validates the company’s approach but also underscores the growing importance of AI in the tech industry, particularly in the search domain. As the AI landscape continues to evolve, Mita Technology, with the support of Ant Group, is well-positioned to make significant contributions to this dynamic field.
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