Top financial institutions are using technology from his AI startup

Yang Yongzhi found success with his first startup, pulling in 100 million users around the world for his Dolphin Browser app before selling it for US$91 million. But for his next venture, Yang is trying something different.

Like, very different.

His second startup, ABC Technology, is going after enterprises rather than folks like you and me.

“I think it’s very hard to do something on the consumer side,” says Yang about China’s fiercely competitive tech industry.

“Either you have to raise a lot of money – and your company will be controlled by VCs, by capital – or you have to raise money from ‘BAT’, the internet giants,” he explains, referring to a nickname for the powerful Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent triumvirate. “And then you’ve also lost control.”

Yang Yongzhi. Photo credit: ABC Technology.

“So that’s why I chose an enterprise service,” the 40-year-old founder adds.

He started it July 2016, four months after selling his first biz.

He’s now on a learning curve as he grapples with artificial intelligence. That’s the core of his new business: using AI to search and collate information relevant to financial institutions.

ABC Technology already has around 50 corporate clients, including Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, China’s top insurer Ping An, and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong.

Yang and his team of 250 – mainly engineers – are headquartered in Beijing. They’re focusing on mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, before going after the US and Europe later in the year.

Data distiller

The startup has three services for businesses: financial data extraction engine Parsing.ai, financial search engine Analyst.ai, and research management tech Modeling.ai.

Raushan Singh, ABC Technology’s product manager, gives me an enthusiastic run-through of all three. Although I struggle with numbers larger than those taught me by Sesame Street, it’s clear to see how useful the automated services are – particularly the way Parsing.ai can scan text and even images to create editable data and interactive charts.

Analyst.ai, meanwhile, has a trove of over 30 million public documents, searchable with natural language. It’s the “financial version of Google,” Singh says.

Second time’s the charm

Change of pace