10 Chinese Start-ups to Watch Out in 2019
By Anastasia Chapman

2019值得关注的 10家中国创业公司

创新力量逐渐从西方向东方转移，特别是在中国和印度等人口众多的国家，这是一个新时代的开始，这种变化已经存在了相当长的一段时间。

在过去的几十年里，中国初创企业的数量和质量急剧增加和增高。尽管在将近14亿中国人口中有相当一部分仍居住在农村地区，但毕竟我们说的是一个比美国大四倍以上的国家，在这样的人口统计数据里很容易找到新的创业想法的人。

其中一个很好的例子是自行车共享公司摩拜单车，根据2017年的AI-Stanford报告显示，仅10个月摩拜单车就从零订单发展到20万。中国并不缺乏独角兽。从面部识别，电子商务到自行车共享等，这里是2019年值得关注的十大中国初创企业。

- 来电共享充电
- 云从
- 途家
- VIP在线青少儿英语
- 大搜车
- 抖音
- 碳云智能
- 格灵深瞳
- 人工智能
- Pico小鸟看看

As countries move from developing to developed, the younger generation is busy focusing on catching up with technologies and trends that have been skipped by their ancestors. The gradual shift of start-up power from the west to the east, especially in populous countries like China and India, marks the beginning of a new era, and this change has been there for quite some time.
 

In the present time, the quality and number of Chinese start-ups have drastically burgeoned over the past few decades. Although a considerable portion out of the 1,4 billion Chinese population still lives in the rural belts of the country, we are talking about a nation which is more than four times bigger than the United States, where it is easier to find examples of newer start-up ideas with the power of such demographics.
 

One big example is the bike-sharing company, Mobike, that took only ten months to go from nothing to 20 million orders or rides per day, as per the 2017 AI-Stanford report. There is no dearth of such Chinese unicorns. From facial recognition, e-commerce to bike sharing and more, here are the top 10 Chinese start-ups to watch out for in 2019.
 

Laidian

Laidian caters to the needs of heavy mobile users in China. It is a power bank rental start-up that has raised $20MM in 2017 Series A and is only expected to grow in 2019. The start-up provides people with power bank rental terminals to charge their mobile phones, while they are outside their office or home. Their rental terminals are present in more than 80 cities in China, all of which are evenly placed in shopping malls, railway stations and subways, with more than twenty thousand users renting its power banks every day, according to sources provided by All-Tech Asia.

CloudWalk

A surging testament of artificial intelligence in China, CloudWalk is the next big player of a growing Chinese mafia of facial recognition and AI start-ups. The company has raised massive funding from Shunwei Capital, Oriza Holdings and Puhua Capital ($75MM) and the government of Guangzhou ($301MM) and has also partnered with the Zimbabwe government to test their technology with a different ethnicity at a broader scale.

Tujia

Often touted as 'China's Airbnb', the eight years old Tujia is valued at around $1.5B currently and has been attracting investments from the likes of LightSpeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and All-Stars Investment, as well as travel industry players like Ascott, HomeAway and Ctrip. Sadly, they are barely known outside of China, but they intend to go a few steps further than the US-based home rental company.

The online vacation rental site lists close to 300,000 properties in 250 destinations in China currently and is now working on its global expansion, of which it already has 15,000 properties overseas in 100-plus destinations. Their strategy is simple: go where the Chinese tourist goes. Airbnb and Tujia share a similar business model, but there are significant differences between the two, in regard to services. The website provides services tailored to the Chinese audience. Their employees manage the check-ins and check-outs. For all third-party properties, Tujia actually has each house inspected.

VIPKid

This English language tutoring site is scaling at an incredible pace and is even on its way to hit 52 billion yuan ($8 billion) by 2019, according to iResearch. According to its investor materials, VIPKid had 296,363 students and 38,724 teachers in 2017, which is a sharp rise from the 3,305 students and 404 educators it had just after two years of its launch. By 2019, it’s projecting a near 10-fold rise in students to 2.4 million, and more than 280,000 teachers.

DaSouChe

Since 2012, the used car trading platform has already exchanged over 500,000 cars. They are the next unicorn in China's start-up market having raised $180MM in a 2017 Series D round, and with investors like e-commerce firm, Alibaba Group Holding, financial technology company, CreditEase, and insurance company, Sunshine Insurance Group Company Limited, among others participated in the latest round.

TikTok

TikTok videos are all the rage among China’s youth and people across the globe. TikTok or Douyin initially started out as Musical.ly, as a short-video streaming app. It has earned the name of being 'China's Snapchat' after becoming the most downloaded iPhone app in the 1st quarter of 2018. It is also being compared to the now-defunct “Vine,” after it achieved tremendous success in 2018. TikTok saw its daily active users more than double between 2017 and 2018, increasing from 17.4 million to 45.6 million. As of 2018, recent reports show that the platform has over 500 million users.

iCarbonX

This four years old Chinese data firm aims to improve health care using biotech and artificial intelligence. It has created a Digital Life Alliance, bringing together companies into a learning ecosystem around healthy living, disease, and artificial intelligence.

DeepGlint

A computer-vision and artificial intelligence company, DeepGlint, is the first-of-its-kind to invest heavily in human behaviour and trajectory analysis. DeepGlint's software is so powerful that it can easily pick out any individual out of the crowd quickly and identify security to keep an eye on you. Although they have raised a comparatively small $18MM, this makes them highly likely to be a takeover candidate for one of the big AI, eCommerce, or communication companies in China.

Roobo

A hardware and AI company, Roobo, develops next-generation service robots. It’s BeanQ early education consumer robot won Best of Red Dot in 2017. The company continues to innovate with a line of robots, which can carry on a conversation, identify phases and even navigate through places.

Pico Interactive

A game changer in the Chinese virtual reality domain, Pico Interactive, has come up with one of the first high quality, truly wireless VR headsets. The headset has received strong reviews at CES in 2018 and is well positioned to be a technology leader in virtual reality technology.