Tigerobo Raises over RMB 100 Million Series Pre-A to Create an Intelligent Financial Search Engine

HONG KONG, Jun 25, 2018 - (ACN Newswire) - On June 5, 2018, Tigerobo, an AI-based financial search engine start-up, announced today that it has raised over RMB 100 million in Series Pre-A led by NWS Holdings (00659.HK), a subsidiary company of New World Development Company Limited, and Gaorong Capital. Sun Hung Kai & Co. Ltd. (00086.HK ) participated as co-investor. In August 2017, the company closed Series Angel fund raising with tens of millions RMB, participated by Gaorong Capital, Light Up Capital as well as Zhang Tao, founder of Dianping.com.

Tigerobo, which was launched in July 2017, offers an intelligent search engine to help professional and individual investors improve their efficiency of research by orders of magnitude. The accurateness, completeness, and timeliness of information is fundamental to human decision making.

In the financial industry among many others, however, the way people collect and consume information has not kept pace with the revolution of AI. The traditional approach is labor intensive, cannot scale beyond a dozen standard financial metrics, hence missing more important first-order, operational and alternative data, even leading indicators. Human labor is error-prone, cannot respond fast to the overwhelming information. On the other hand, the way users acquire and consume the information is cumbersome, through an over-loaded terminal, by browsing a gigantic portal.

Tigerobo takes an AI-based approach. By leveraging and advancing the cutting-edge neural text processing technology, Tigerobo builds a machine comprehension system that collects and understands the data into knowledge, automatically and promptly as the raw data emerges. The machine comprehended knowledge is then handy for users to consume, through a natural language interfaced chatbot or question-answering system. The team believes this is the future way to consume information and knowledge, on demand, straight to the point, and in real time.

"We will stay at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, so that we can enable superior user experience unprecedentedly, focusing on the financial data industry" said Dr. Chen Ye, founder and CEO of Tigerobo. In less than one year of stealth mode, Tigerobo's intelligent search has covered data from global capital markets, from macroeconomy, industries and companies, and they are expanding rapidly.

The company has been testing its products with professionals from several top financial institutions in China for couple of months. And its accuracy, real-time-ness and efficient search experience has greatly exceeded users' expectation.

Dr. Chen Ye, the founder & CEO, is one of the experts under the Shanghai Thousand Talents Plan. He was a senior vice president of Meituan-Dianping. Prior to that, he had served as principal development manager and principal researcher in Microsoft, eBay, and Yahoo in the United States, deployed several artificial intelligence applications with significant business impact. He has also received best paper awards for three times in top artificial intelligence conferences (KDD and SIGIR) and published more than 20 papers in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of his work has been incorporated into the graduate- level course materials at top AI schools including Stanford and UC Berkeley. Ye obtained Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison, was guest lecturer at UC Berkeley. Dr. Chen holds more than 10 patents.

Dr. John Canny, Tigerobo's co-founder and chief scientist, has been a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1987. John has served as technical advisor for Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, and Google over the past decade, more than half of which he worked closely with Dr. Chen, successfully bringing cutting-edge AI technologies into business reality. John is a world-class computer scientist and AI expert. He has published more than 170 papers and won 15 academic paper awards.

NWS Holdings Executive Director Brian Cheng remarked, "Artificial intelligence has great application potentials in financial information and data anlaysis, and will enable revolutionary development in this industry. The Tigerobo team is ready to grasp this huge opportunity. We are impressed by the team's capabilities in technology and commercialization, and confident that they will bring forward home-grown technological innovations that could impact the world."

"Artificial intelligence is playing a pivotal role in financial services more so than ever. The recent revolutionary advance in AI is very likely to reshape the industrial structure or even enable new business models. Tigerobo has a world-class team in technology and product development. The team is building innovative products to offer unprecedented user experience and bring financial data and knowledge to every individual rather than only accessible to a few professionals. Gaorong is very honored to be part of the great journey," said Yue Bin, the founding partner of Gaorong Capital.

Li Chenghuang, the Chairman of Sun Hung Kai Co., Ltd. also shared his opinion, "Tigerobo's core founding team has world-class scientists and algorithm experts in the field of artificial intelligence. They have profound insight into the industry, and their approach and product just hit the pain points, hence have an immense potential. We have been actively and strategically invested in finance and fintech worldwide recent years, which will bring a strong synergy with Tigerobo."

"We share the same view as the team that AI will revolutionize the user experience in financial sector. We are constantly impressed by Tigerobo's capability and vision along the way, and look forward to supporting their continued growth." said Li Jing, the founding partner of Light Up Capital.

The funding will enable the company to continuous invest on talents, technology and product, data acquisition, as well as business development.

"No better time than now to be an innovator and entrepreneur in China", Chen Ye commented with full passion: "China has a massive market, and talents and technology are rapidly catching up with most developed countries. We are determined to solve world-class problems through fundemantal scientific research and hard-core engineering, and to create a China-made world leading technology phenomenon."