(News source: Synced) In 2017, AI industry continued to develop strongly with lots of research achievements and industry cases. The science and technology giants have pushing forward the technology research and the platform construction. Start-up companies have rapidly grown up by adopting thier solutions to real applications. Many early projects have gradually come into shape.

Under such circumstances, Synced (机器之心) launched the first annual Machine Intelligence Awards, which aimed to record the progress of AI industry within the past year. The award winners are anticipated to bring inspiration to all AI industry peers by their achievements and experiences.

In the candidate recommendation phase, we received hundreds of applications, including industry giants, vertical unicorns and early start-up companies, covering many hot areas such as health, finance, security, transportation, retail, education and so on.

According to the R&D capability, technology and products, business and industry potential, operation capability, capital and financial situation, innovation and practicality,  we selected four awards: the World's Top 30 AI Start-ups, China's Top 10 AI R&D Capability Enterprises, China's Top 10 Most Potential AI start-ups  and the Best 30 AI Application Cases.

ThinkForce won the title of China's Top 10 Most Potential AI Start-ups, together with Aibee, Coherent, Black Sesame Technology, Pony.ai, Deepmotion, CelePixel, Yiwise.ai, Yuzhi and Light theto.

ThinkForce was founded by experts of silicon design, software algorithm and system development. Lots of their team members are SJTU alumni with profound industrial background. They aspires to provide world class intelligent semiconductors with leading AI algorithms and advanced silicon art, upon which they build AI hardware platform and offer one-stop industry solution. ThinkForce proposes the concept of "chip as algorithm", using chip virtualization technology on chip architecture and firmware, multiplying chip usage in the scenarios requiring elastic computing.

In December 2017 ThinkForce announced the completion of the 450 million RMB series A round financing from YITU, YF Capital, Sequoia Capital and Hillhouse Capital. It also built Joint Lab of Visual Computing and Application with SJTU and YITU, focusing on the high performance visual computing algorithm, architecture, chip and the real industry application.