Yin Qi (Qi Yin)
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Jun 8, 2026
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Yin Qi (Chinese: 印奇; born January 1988), sometimes written in English as Qi Yin, is a Chinese computer scientist and technology entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and longtime chief executive of Megvii (Chinese: 旷视科技), one of China's pioneering computer vision companies and the developer of the Face++ facial recognition platform. A graduate of the elite "Yao Class" at Tsinghua University, Yin built Megvii into one of the country's most prominent artificial intelligence startups before it was placed on a United States trade blacklist in 2019 and saw three successive attempts to go public end in failure. Since 2024 he has reinvented himself around automobiles and language models, taking the chairmanship of the smart-driving company Qianli Technology and, in 2026, of the large language model developer StepFun. MIT Technology Review named him to its Innovators Under 35 (TR35) list. [1][3]
Yin was born in January 1988 in Wuhu, a city in China's eastern Anhui province. [2] A consistently top-ranked student, he entered Tsinghua University in 2006 to study automation and was soon selected into the university's "Yao Class" (姚班), the experimental undergraduate computer-science program founded in 2005 by the Turing Award laureate Andrew Yao (Yao Qizhi) within Tsinghua's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. [2][5] Admitting only a small group of the country's strongest students each year, the Yao Class became a celebrated incubator of Chinese AI founders. [5] During his sophomore year Yin interned at Microsoft Research Asia, where he worked on face recognition and computer-vision research that would define his later career. [2][5] He earned a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua in 2010. [2]
Yin then moved to the United States, enrolling at Columbia University in New York in 2011 to pursue doctoral study in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence. He left the program with a master's degree in 2013, choosing to commit himself full time to the company he had already helped start back in China. [2]
Megvii was founded in October 2011 in Beijing's Zhongguancun technology district by Yin and two fellow Tsinghua students, Tang Wenbin (唐文斌) and Yang Mu (杨沐), whom he had come to know through the Yao Class and the national informatics-olympiad community. [5][12] The company's English name is a contraction of "mega vision." [12] Yin took the roles of chairman and chief executive, with Tang as chief technology officer and Yang as a lead engineer. [5] The founders' first public release was a casual mobile game built to show off their head-tracking and vision algorithms, but they quickly refocused on a business-to-business product: in 2012 they launched Face++, billed as China's first online face-recognition platform, offering developers cloud-based application programming interfaces for detecting and analyzing faces. [12]
Early capital came from Sinovation Ventures (创新工场), the venture firm led by former Google and Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee, which backed Megvii's Series A in 2013. [2] Over the following years the startup raised more than 1.3 billion US dollars across multiple rounds and became one of China's most valuable AI companies. [2] Alibaba and its financial affiliate Ant Group invested from the mid-2010s and grew into Megvii's largest strategic shareholders; a roughly 750 million dollar Series D in 2019, led by Alibaba, Ant Group and Bank of China Group Investment, valued the company at about 4 billion dollars. [2][4]
Face++ became Megvii's flagship and, for a time, the world's largest cloud face-recognition platform, used by hundreds of thousands of developers across roughly 150 countries to identify faces and read government identity documents. [6] In China the technology was embedded in widely used consumer services, including identity verification for Alibaba's Alipay and the ride-hailing platform Didi, and in 2017 the "paying with your face" application built on such systems was named one of MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies. [6] MIT Technology Review separately listed Yin among its Innovators Under 35, crediting him with "striking a balance between pragmatism and faith in technology." [1]
As deep learning matured, Megvii repositioned itself as an "AIoT" company applying AI to the Internet of Things, organized around three business lines: Consumer IoT (device unlocking and computational photography for smartphones), City IoT (smart-city, public-security and surveillance deployments), and Supply Chain IoT (warehouse and logistics automation). [9][12] Underpinning these was Brain++, the company's in-house AI development platform, whose core deep learning framework, MegEngine, was open-sourced to global developers in March 2020. [9] For logistics, Megvii built an operating system called Hetu (河图) to coordinate fleets of warehouse robots, a system deployed by customers including Alibaba's Tmall. [12]
Megvii's rise collided with geopolitics and tightening scrutiny of facial recognition. In October 2019 the United States Commerce Department added Megvii to its Entity List, alongside fellow Chinese AI firms SenseTime, Yitu, iFlytek and Hikvision, citing alleged involvement in surveillance and human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. Megvii denied the accusations, but the designation cut it off from key American suppliers. [3][11]
The blacklisting derailed the company's repeated efforts to go public. Megvii first filed for a Hong Kong initial public offering in August 2019, seeking 500 million to 1 billion dollars, but the application lapsed after the Entity List action. [8][11] It then pivoted to Shanghai's STAR Market: the exchange's listing committee approved the offering in September 2021, yet the registration stalled at the securities regulator from early 2022 amid questions over data compliance, and the bid languished for more than two years. [7][8] In December 2024 Megvii and its sponsor withdrew the application altogether, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange terminated its review. Megvii therefore never completed a public listing, ending three failed attempts spanning five years. [7][8] The drawn-out process also exposed the heavy accumulated losses typical of capital-intensive AI startups of its generation. [7]
In 2024 Yin pivoted decisively toward the automobile industry. In July 2024 he agreed to acquire a 19.91 percent stake in Lifan Technology, a Chongqing-listed carmaker, for 2.43 billion yuan (about 337 million dollars), making him its second-largest shareholder, and in November 2024 he was named chairman of its board. [4] Around the same time Megvii signed an agreement with Geely and the Chongqing municipal government to develop connected and intelligent vehicles, and Yin stepped back from his executive role at Megvii as the STAR Market bid was abandoned. [3][4] In February 2025 Lifan was renamed Qianli Technology (千里科技) and adopted an "AI plus auto" strategy spanning autonomous driving, intelligent cockpits and robotaxis, drawing on Megvii's Chongqing-based smart-driving team. [3][10] Working with Geely, Qianli launched a driver-assistance brand and pushed toward a Hong Kong listing of its own. [10]
Yin extended his comeback into generative AI in early 2026. On January 26, 2026, StepFun (阶跃星辰), a Shanghai foundation-model startup founded by former Microsoft executive Jiang Daxin, closed a Series B+ round of more than 5 billion yuan (about 717 million dollars), described as the largest private fundraising in China's large-model sector in the prior year, and Yin became its chairman. [3][8] The move tied his ventures together: Qianli, Geely and StepFun formed an alliance to build an AI "Agent OS" intelligent-cockpit system for cars. [3] Caixin characterized the sequence as Megvii's co-founder returning to ride the latest wave of artificial intelligence. [3]
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1988 | Born in Wuhu, Anhui province |
| 2006 | Enters Tsinghua University and is selected into the Yao Class |
| 2010 | Earns a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University |
| 2011 | Co-founds Megvii in Beijing with Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu; enrolls at Columbia University |
| 2012 | Megvii launches the Face++ face-recognition platform |
| 2013 | Earns a master's degree from Columbia University |
| 2017 | "Paying with your face" named an MIT Technology Review Breakthrough Technology; Yin listed in Innovators Under 35 |
| 2019 | Megvii added to the US Entity List; Hong Kong IPO filing lapses |
| 2020 | Megvii open-sources the MegEngine deep learning framework |
| 2021 | Shanghai STAR Market listing approved by the exchange's committee |
| 2024 | Buys into and becomes chairman of Lifan Technology; Megvii withdraws its STAR Market bid |
| 2025 | Lifan renamed Qianli Technology under an "AI plus auto" strategy |
| 2026 | Becomes chairman of StepFun after its 5 billion yuan funding round |