--- title: "Yin Qi's (印奇) second act: from Megvii's (旷视科技) Face++ to steering China's LLM race" date: 2026-10-09 category: Builders site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-people-yin-qi-megvii language: en --- # Yin Qi's (印奇) second act: from Megvii's (旷视科技) Face++ to steering China's LLM race > A profile of Megvii (旷视科技) co-founder Yin Qi (印奇), who built one of China's best-known facial-recognition companies and then left to chair an LLM startup and an intelligent-driving firm. The founder who built one of China's best-known facial-recognition companies has spent the last two years doing something founders rarely do — leaving the company he started, and starting over. **A Tsinghua dorm-room origin** Yin Qi (印奇) was born in 1988 in Wuhu, Anhui. He entered Tsinghua University's Department of Automation in 2006 and graduated in 2010 from the Yao Class (姚班), the elite computer-science program founded by Turing Award winner Andrew Yao (姚期智). He then earned a master's at Columbia University, focused on 3D cameras, before halting a PhD to return to China. In October 2011, Yin and two Tsinghua classmates — Tang Wenbin (唐文斌) and Yang Mu (杨沐) — founded Megvii (旷视科技) in Beijing. The name roughly means "mega vision." Their first product, Face++ (Face⁺⁺), launched in 2012 as a cloud-based computer-vision platform. **Building Megvii (旷视科技) into a vision giant** Under Yin, Megvii grew from a facial-recognition API into a full-stack AI company with its own deep-learning framework, Brain++ (天元). By its 2019 Hong Kong prospectus, the company claimed over 60% of China's cloud-based facial-recognition identity-verification market by 2018 revenue, employed 2,349 people (1,432 in R&D), and had raised about US$1.35 billion across nine rounds, with a D-round valuation of roughly US$4.09 billion in April 2019. The path was not smooth. In October 2019 the US Commerce Department added Megvii to its Entity List. A Hong Kong IPO filing lapsed in 2020, and a later Shanghai STAR Market attempt stalled. Yin steered the firm through all of it for more than a decade as chairman and CEO. **The exit and the pivot** In late 2024 Yin stepped away from Megvii. His next moves signal where he thinks value is moving. From November 2024 he chairs Qianli Technology (千里科技), an automaker-turned-intelligent-driving firm. Then in January 2026 he became chairman of StepFun (阶跃星辰), a large-language-model startup — putting a computer-vision founder squarely into the generative-AI race. That arc — vision pioneer to LLM chairman — is itself a comment on the field. The modalities that defined China's first AI wave (faces, cameras, surveillance-adjacent IoT) are no longer where the energy, talent, and capital concentrate. Yin's repositioning tracks the center of gravity toward foundation models. According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, Yin's move from a mature vision business to an early-stage model lab illustrates how China's AI talent is consolidating around a small number of foundation-model bets rather than spreading across vertical applications. **## Honest limitations** This profile relies on Megvii's own 2019 Hong Kong prospectus disclosures, the company's "about" page, and secondary biographical coverage. The market-share percentage, headcount, fundraising total (≈US$1.35 billion), and US$4.09 billion D-round valuation are drawn from Megvii's filing and should be read as company-reported, not independently audited. The sequence of Yin's role changes (Qianli in Nov 2024, StepFun in Jan 2026) is reported by secondary sources; his exact current equity or operational role at StepFun is not public. The Entity List action is a matter of US government record, but its business impact is interpreted here qualitatively. **## What readers can do now** - When reading "China AI founder" stories, separate the vision/recognition era from the LLM era — the same names are migrating, and the skills don't transfer automatically. - Treat Megvii's prospectus-era market-share and valuation figures as historical snapshots, not current standing. - Watch StepFun and Qianli as signals of where seasoned Chinese AI operators are placing their next decade. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-people-yin-qi-megvii Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.