Xu Li
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Xu Li (Chinese: 徐立; born in the 1980s) is a Chinese computer scientist and technology entrepreneur who co-founded SenseTime, one of China's largest artificial intelligence companies, and serves as its executive chairman and chief executive officer. A computer vision researcher trained at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Xu has led SenseTime since its founding in 2014, building it from an academic spinout into a publicly listed firm known for facial recognition, smart-city systems, autonomous driving, and, more recently, the SenseNova family of large foundation models. After the death of co-founder and chairman Tang Xiaoou in December 2023, Xu took on the chairmanship and accelerated the company's pivot from traditional computer vision toward generative AI. [1][2][3]
Xu earned both his bachelor's degree (2004) and his master's degree (2007) in computer science and technology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. [1][3] He then moved to Hong Kong for doctoral study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, completing a PhD in computer science around 2010. [1] According to his Chinese-language biographical profile, Xu studied in the university's Multimedia Laboratory, the computer vision research group founded by professor Tang Xiaoou, who supervised his doctoral work and would later become his co-founder and chairman at SenseTime. [3]
After his doctorate, Xu remained at CUHK as a postdoctoral fellow before moving into industry research. From August 2013 he worked as a manager and advisory researcher at Lenovo in Hong Kong, and over his academic career he also held visiting research positions tied to Motorola's China research institute, the Omron Research Institute, and Microsoft Research. [1] His doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on computer vision and image processing; his official biography credits him with more than 50 papers at international conferences and journals, several algorithms contributed to the open-source OpenCV library, and a best-paper award at the NPAR 2012 graphics conference. [1][3]
SenseTime was founded in October 2014 in Hong Kong, emerging from Tang Xiaoou's Multimedia Laboratory at CUHK. [2] Tang, a professor in the university's Department of Information Engineering, assembled a founding team drawn largely from his lab, including Xu Li as chief executive, Wang Xiaogang as chief scientist, and other researchers such as Xu Bing, Yang Fan, and Lin Dahua. [2][6] The company was an early beneficiary of the deep learning wave: its researchers had built some of the first neural networks to surpass human-level accuracy on face-verification benchmarks, and SenseTime commercialized that work for the Chinese market.
Tang served as founder and chairman and, through a weighted voting-rights structure, controlled roughly 70 percent of the company's voting power, while Xu ran day-to-day operations as CEO. [2][5] Backed by investors including Alibaba, SoftBank, and others, SenseTime grew quickly into one of the world's most valuable AI startups, reaching a private valuation of about $7.7 billion by 2018. [2] Xu became the public face of the company, and he was named to Fortune magazine's "40 Under 40" list in 2018 and EY's Entrepreneur of the Year for China in the technology category that same year. [1]
Under Xu, SenseTime developed a broad portfolio of computer vision and pattern-recognition technologies, spanning facial recognition, image and object recognition, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analytics, autonomous driving, and remote sensing. [2] These were packaged into vertical business lines that the company described as smart city, smart business, smart life, and smart auto. Its facial recognition and smart-city surveillance systems, sold to police departments and local governments, were the early commercial backbone, while the SenseAuto unit supplied perception and intelligent-cabin software for vehicles. [2]
Two pillars underpin the business. SenseCore is the company's large-scale AI computing infrastructure, anchored by a major AI data center in the Lingang area of Shanghai that supplies the training capacity for its models. SenseTime also moved into consumer products, most visibly the SenseRobot AI chess-playing robot launched in August 2022. [2] As the firm pivoted toward generative AI, it reorganized around an integrated strategy it summarized as "AI infrastructure, large model, application," with SenseCore providing compute, SenseNova providing the models, and vertical applications sitting on top. [4]
In April 2023 SenseTime launched SenseNova (Chinese: 日日新), a foundation-model platform that became the centerpiece of Xu's strategy to reinvent the company around generative AI. The platform spans large language models, text-to-image generation, and digital-human and other multimodal tools, fronted by a chatbot assistant called SenseChat. [4][7] SenseTime iterated rapidly: SenseNova 5.0 arrived in April 2024, with the company claiming performance comparable to or exceeding GPT-4 Turbo on several benchmarks, a release that sent its Hong Kong shares up more than 30 percent in a day. [4][7] SenseNova 5.5, billed as a real-time multimodal model, followed in mid-2024, and in April 2025 the company released SenseNova V6, a native mixture-of-experts multimodal model with more than 600 billion parameters and long chain-of-thought reasoning. [7] In late 2025 SenseTime open-sourced SenseNova-SI, a spatial-intelligence model series it said outperformed leading closed-source systems on spatial-reasoning benchmarks. [7]
The pivot reshaped SenseTime's finances. To free up resources for the model business, Xu oversaw a "1+X" restructuring in which "1" represented the core generative AI and traditional computer vision operations and "X" represented vertical ecosystem companies, including smart auto, home robotics, smart healthcare, and smart retail, that were spun into independent subsidiaries with their own chief executives. [8] Generative AI became the group's largest segment: its revenue more than doubled in 2024, and for the full year 2025 it rose about 51 percent to roughly 3.6 billion yuan, accounting for around 72 percent of total revenue. [8][9] Total 2025 revenue reached about 5.0 billion yuan (roughly $724 million), up about 32 percent, while the net loss narrowed by nearly 59 percent; in the second half of 2025 the company reported its first positive EBITDA and positive operating cash flow since its IPO, and it said it planned to release a new foundation model in the second quarter of 2026. [9]
Xu has led SenseTime through sustained pressure from the United States. In October 2019 the company was placed on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List, restricting its access to American technology, over allegations that its products were used in human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region, alongside peers such as Megvii, Hikvision, and iFlytek. [2][10] SenseTime has denied the allegations. On December 10, 2021, the U.S. Treasury added SenseTime to its list of "Chinese military-industrial complex companies," barring American investment in its shares; the move came on the day the company had planned to price its IPO and forced a brief delay. [2][11] SenseTime has also appeared on the U.S. Defense Department's Section 1260H list of "Chinese military companies." [12] To cope with chip-export restrictions, the company has increasingly shifted its computing toward domestic processors from suppliers such as Huawei and Biren. [2]
SenseTime completed its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing on December 30, 2021, on its second attempt after the Treasury sanction. Pricing shares at HK$3.85 and selling 1.5 billion of them, it raised about $740 million in one of Hong Kong's largest IPOs of the year, and the stock closed its debut session up about 7 percent. [2][13]
The company's other defining challenge was the sudden death of Tang Xiaoou, who died of an illness on December 15, 2023, at the age of 55. [5] SenseTime's shares fell sharply on the news. Because Tang's controlling Class A voting rights lapsed on his death, the company was left without a single controlling shareholder, and his widow, Yang Qiumei, inherited a stake of roughly 21 percent that made her its largest shareholder. [14] Xu Li, who had been chief executive since 2014, assumed the role of executive chairman of the board, consolidating leadership of the company and pressing ahead with its generative-AI transformation. [5][14]
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2004 | Bachelor's degree in computer science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University |
| 2007 | Master's degree in computer science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University |
| ~2010 | PhD, Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Tang Xiaoou's Multimedia Laboratory |
| October 2014 | Co-founds SenseTime; becomes chief executive officer |
| October 2019 | SenseTime added to the U.S. Commerce Department Entity List |
| December 2021 | U.S. Treasury investment ban; SenseTime IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange |
| April 2023 | Launch of the SenseNova foundation-model platform |
| December 2023 | Tang Xiaoou dies; Xu becomes executive chairman |
| April 2024 to 2025 | SenseNova 5.0, 5.5, and V6 releases; "1+X" restructuring |
| 2025 | Generative AI reaches about 72 percent of revenue; first positive H2 EBITDA since IPO |