Megvii (legally Beijing Kuangshi Technology Co., Ltd.) is one of China’s most prominent computer-vision companies, founded in 2011 by Yin Qi and two classmates from Tsinghua University. It became internationally known through Face++, its developer platform offering facial recognition and other vision APIs, which positioned Megvii among the handful of firms - alongside SenseTime - that led China’s facial recognition industry.
The company describes itself as an AI company built on its self-developed platform, Brain++, which it says “covers all aspects from AI production (output algorithm model) to application.” Beyond cloud APIs, Megvii sells hardware such as face-recognition access-control terminals used for building entry, attendance tracking, and, as its own materials note, temperature measurement. Its technology has been embedded in consumer phones, payment systems, and city infrastructure across China.
Megvii’s facial recognition work placed it at the center of the global debate over AI and surveillance. The company was among several Chinese AI firms added to US government trade restriction lists over concerns about the use of such technology, and it has been named in reporting on surveillance of minority populations - allegations the company has disputed. Like its peers, Megvii operated in a domestic environment where face recognition was deployed at large scale across public and commercial settings.
Megvii’s trajectory illustrates how quickly facial recognition moved from research labs into mass deployment in the 2010s, and how a technology that is largely the same the world over became inseparable, in public debate, from the policy and human-rights context in which it is used.