2014 SenseTime was co-founded in October 2014 by
Tang Xiao'ou, a professor of the Department of Information Engineering at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and computer scientist
Xu Li, among others.
2015 During 2015, nine of SenseTime's papers were accepted into the
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
2016 In 2016, 16 of SenseTime's papers were accepted in the CVPR Conference, and during the year's
ImageNet competition, the company won first place in the object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis.
2017 In October 2017,
Qualcomm entered into a collaboration agreement with SenseTime. The following month, the
Shanghai Municipal Government signed a
strategic alliance agreement with SenseTime. In December 2017, Honda and SenseTime signed a collaboration agreement. In November 2017, SenseTime set up a 'smart policing' company with Leon, a major supplier of data analysis and surveillance technology in
Xinjiang.
2018 In February 2018, SenseTime and
MIT announced the creation of a programme to further advance AI research. In April 2018, SenseTime,
Alibaba, and the
Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) partnered together to form a
nonprofit artificial intelligence lab in Hong Kong. The following month, SenseTime signed a collaborative
memorandum of understanding with
Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore and
Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel). In August of that same summer, SenseTime launched its first North American smart health lab in
New Jersey. In September 2018, SenseTime became one of the founding members of the Global Artificial Intelligence Academic Alliance (GAIAA), along with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
University of Sydney,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Tsinghua University,
Fudan University,
Zhejiang University,
Nanyang Technological University, and seven other universities. On 20 September 2018, SenseTime was named as China's National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision.
The Wall Street Journal reported that SenseTiime was valued at $7.7 billion at the end of 2018. As a result of its valuation, SenseTime is a
unicorn. China's government designated SenseTime as one of its "AI
champions" in 2018.
2019 SenseTime joined MIT's Quest for Intelligence campaign. SenseTime has a large high-performance computing network which supports its development and fielding of AI applications. According to a report by Gregory C. Allen of the
Center for a New American Security, SenseTime's computing network includes "54,000,000 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) cores across 15,000 GPUs within 12 GPU clusters." In April 2019,
The New York Times reported that SenseTime's software was used in the development of facial recognition systems used by the Chinese government directed largely at
Uyghurs. In October 2019, SenseTime was placed on the United States
Bureau of Industry and Security's
Entity List for using its technology for human rights abuses in
Xinjiang.
2020 In August 2020,
Bloomberg News reported that SenseTime was considering an
IPO in Hong Kong.
2021 On 9 July, SenseTime appointed
Liu Cixin as advisor to its sci-fi research project. On 19 July, SenseTime launched its international AI innovation hub in Singapore. In August, SenseTime filed for IPO on
Hong Kong Stock Exchange and, in November, received regulatory approval to list. In September 2021,
Axios reported that SenseTime uses a subsidiary, Shanghai SenseTime, to sidestep U.S. sanctions targeting subsidiary Beijing SenseTime. On 10 December 2021, on
Human Rights Day, the
United States Department of the Treasury placed the company on an investment blacklist on its IPO pricing day because of its alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, banning U.S. investment in the company. The company denied the allegations, said it had "been caught in the middle of geopolitical disputes," and postponed its Hong Kong IPO plan. The company hired law firm
Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which argued that the investment ban did not apply to the company's parent domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The IPO, which had already been downsized from an expected US$2 billion to $767 million due to a PRC crackdown on tech companies, was delayed further. On 13 December, SenseTime announced that it will postpone its IPO. Its $767 million
Hong Kong dollars offering was relaunched in Hong Kong on 20 December. On 30 December, SenseTime completed its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
2022 On 18 February, index compiler Hang Seng Indexes Co. added SenseTime to the Hang Seng TECH Index. On 9 August, SenseTime launched its first consumer-facing product – SenseRobot – a Chinese chess-playing robot. On 19 August, Hang Seng Indexes included SenseTime in the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index and increased its weighting in Hang Seng TECH Index from 0.15 to 1.76. On 31 October, flagship Chinese publication of
SPH Media Trust,
Lianhe Zaobao, inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SenseTime to digitalise the newspaper's work processes for visual content.
2023 In February 2023, SenseTime was invited to join the
government of Hong Kong's delegation's visit to Saudi Arabia. During the trip, SenseTime exchanged an MOU with King Abdullah Financial District and Sela, a cultural tourism event management company in Saudi Arabia, to deepen collaborations in areas including smart city and digital tourism. In December 2023, SenseTime's stock price fell 18% following the unexpected death of its founder Tang Xiao'ou. In December 2023, SenseTime introduced SenseRobotGo, an interactive machine that plays the Chinese board game
Go, to markets in
Japan and
South Korea.
2024 In April 2024, shares of the company surged by more than 30 percent after they announced their AI generative model, SenseNova 5.0. In October 2024, the company stated to
Nikkei Asia that they were shifting to use more Chinese domestic chips. Alvin Zou, vice president of SenseTime's Asia Pacific Operations said that their Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) in Shanghai was equipped by Huawei and
Biren Technology's chips. In December 2024, the
United States Department of Defense labeled the company a "Chinese military company" operating in the U.S. ==Products and services==