Xu Li, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of SenseTime, has led the day-to-day growth of one of China’s most prominent AI companies since its founding in 2014. Xu earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University before pursuing a PhD in computer vision and imaging, which he completed in 2010. He went on to study under Professor Tang Xiao’ou at the Multimedia Laboratory of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where the research that would eventually become SenseTime originated.
Alongside Tang and fellow PhD student Xu Bing, Xu co-founded SenseTime in 2014, building on breakthrough facial recognition technology developed in Tang’s university lab. That same year, the team released DeepID, a facial recognition model that surpassed human-level accuracy — a defining early achievement that positioned SenseTime at the forefront of China’s computer vision industry. While Tang focused on research strategy and academic partnerships until his passing in 2023, Xu has been responsible for the company’s overall strategy and day-to-day operations as CEO.
Under Xu’s leadership, SenseTime expanded well beyond facial recognition into deep learning, smart city solutions, autonomous driving, and large-scale foundation models, building a research team that at one point made up more than two-thirds of the company’s total workforce. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2021, navigating a challenging environment that included being placed on U.S. trade and investment blacklists.
Xu has continued to steer SenseTime through a difficult and competitive period for Chinese AI companies, balancing continued investment in research with the commercial pressures facing publicly listed technology firms. Under his direction, SenseTime remains one of the most visible symbols of China’s ambitions in computer vision and AI — a company built on the conviction that AI innovation could scale from a university research lab into a global technology enterprise.
