How Esther Wong rose from IT support in the US to senior management at China’s SenseTime

About 20 years of banking and investment experience have taught Esther Wong the value of strong research to find gems from among the many companies in the market. That acumen is now serving her well in the complex field of artificial intelligence.

SenseTime intelligent video analytics / Photo credit: SenseTime

Wong, 42, serves as managing director and head of strategic investments at SenseTime Group, the world’s most valuable AI startup and one of Beijing’s handpicked champions advancing China’s ambition to become a global leader in that technology.

Since joining SenseTime in April last year, Wong has focused investments on companies within the AI ecosystem and finding long-term strategic partners. She is also a partner in the SenseTime AI Fund, which has about 5 billion yuan (US$724 million) of assets under management.

Beyond finding good deals, SenseTime wants to “empower the startups we invest in and help them with our technologies,” said Wong in an interview in Beijing.

She has led SenseTime’s investment in Chinese startups Ling Technology, which designs various AI consumer products, and Moviebook, which develops technologies for online video services.

Those deals reflect the premium Wong has put on companies with the same solid research background as Hong Kong Science Park-based SenseTime.

SenseTime was probably the first Chinese company she encountered as a banker that has its own fundamental research, said Wong, recalling her first visit to the AI firm’s offices in 2015.

At that time, Wong was managing director and head of equity capital markets at Bocom International. She brought a group of investors to SenseTime, where they met company founder Tang Xiaoou.

“It was the last day and final visit of our tour, so some investors were understandably tired,” Wong said. “But I was well awake, being very impressed by professor Tang Xiaoou’s research achievements.”

Photo credit: Ekkasit Keatsirikul

Tang, a professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, founded SenseTime in 2014 with a group of long-standing academic colleagues from the university.

Wong said most startup founders simply describe their company’s vision. “With professor Tang, he told us that SenseTime was one of the most prolific research paper publishers globally and their latest Gaussian face algorithm surpassed the accuracy of human eyes,” she said.