CloudWalk's initial funding came from the Guangzhou municipal government in 2017.[6]: 13 The same year, CloudWalk raised $379 million in Series B funding from investors including Shunwei Capital, Oriza Holdings, and Puhua Capital.[7] In 2018, CloudWalk signed an agreement with the government of Zimbabwe to create a national facial-recognition database and monitoring system.[8]
Cloudwalk recorded an aggregate net loss of US$398 million from 2018 to 2020. Other than the company's financial state, the company also dealt with regulations relating to personal data, preventing it from publicly listing its shares. In 2021, its initial public offering (IPO) application was accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange.[9] In May 2022, the company floated some of its shares publicly on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. However, the initial public offering price was lower than what was originally anticipated which was slashed by 29 percent from the pre-IPO valuation.[10]
On May 22, 2020, the United States Department of Commerce added CloudWalk Technology to its Entity List for its role in aiding the Chinese government in the mass surveillance of the Uyghur population. CloudWalk Technology partnered with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to develop the surveillance technology.[12] According to U.S. officials, CloudWalk Technology was "complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)".[13] In December 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury prohibited all U.S. investment in Cloudwalk Technology, accusing the company of complicity in aiding the Uyghur genocide.[4]
In 2018, CloudWalk signed a deal to provide the government of Zimbabwe with a mass facial recognition system, which will monitor all major transportation hubs, as well as create a national facial ID database.[15][16]
^Jiang, Sijia (November 23, 2017). Coates, Stephen; Sarkar, Himani (eds.). "Exclusive: China's SenseTime plans IPO, U.S. R&D center as early as 2018". Reuters. Archived from the original on December 29, 2017. Retrieved December 20, 2017. Several Chinese facial recognition start-ups have attracted large fundraising, helped by a government push to make China a world leader in AI. Guangzhou Cloudwalk Technology has recently received about $379 million in Series B funding, while Beijing-based Face++ last month raised $460 million.
^Ng, Brady. "Cloudwalk to be the first of China's 4 'AI dragons' to go public | KrASIA". amp.kr-asia.com. Retrieved 2024-10-31. According to Cloudwalk's prospectus, the company ran an aggregate net loss of RMB 2.58 billion, or USD 398 million, in the three years from 2018 to 2020. Its financial state, as well as regulatory adjustments related to personal data, may be obstacles on the road to going public.
^"向非洲出口黑科技 中国"鹰眼"将服务津巴布韦". Science and Technology Daily (in Chinese). April 12, 2018. Archived from the original on July 25, 2018. Retrieved July 25, 2018.
