YITU

YITU (依图科技) is a Chinese AI company historically grouped among the "AI Four Dragons" (AI四小龙) alongside SenseTime, CloudWalk, and Megvii, with a foundation in computer vision that expanded into speech recognition, NLP, and autonomous AI chips . In 2019, the company was designated by China's Ministry of Science and Technology to build the national open innovation platform for visual computing, and that October it launched an open ecosystem plan around its AI chip "Qiusuo" (求索) to promote integration between chip design and artificial intelligence . YITU also partnered with the Ministry of Public Security's Traffic Management Research Institute to establish a joint laboratory applying video cognition algorithms to intelligent traffic management .

The company's technical achievements during this period included consecutive championships in NIST facial recognition tests and a first-place finish in the VoxSRC voiceprint recognition competition with an equal error rate of 0.0098 . Beyond vision, YITU applied NLP to pediatric disease diagnosis in collaboration with Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center, publishing results in *Nature Medicine*—which Gaorong Ventures described as setting a new record for Chinese AI in medicine . The firm also developed its own AI chip, positioning it around a "algorithm-is-chip" concept and a "smart density" theory for scenario-based AI deployment .

Gaorong Ventures invested in YITU and counted it among its portfolio of "world-class technology companies" alongside Nuro, Roborock, and Huami . By late 2020, YITU was among over 20 Gaorong-backed companies valued above $1 billion . However, elsewhere's corpus does not contain material on YITU's activities after 2020, leaving its current commercial trajectory and positioning unaccounted for in more recent reporting.