A $100 Million Chinese Artificial Intelligence IPO

They say that if the entire population of China were to walk past you, the line would never end. The implication is that it would take so long for the people to pass by you that the rate of reproduction would make sure there was always someone walking past you, even though they may not have been born when the exercise first started. The point is, there are a whole lot of Chinese out there – enough so that they make up 18.53% of all the people on this planet.

It’s difficult to operate in China as a foreign firm, and that’s why we’re seeing incredibly large numbers from firms like Ant Financial – the biggest fintech company in the world. Since they haven’t had an IPO yet, retail investors can only hope to get exposure to Ant Financial by purchasing shares in Alibaba (BABA) which owns an equity stake of 33% in Ant Financial. Soon though, there may be another interesting Chinese success story for retail investors to get a piece of. This time, it’s an artificial intelligence company called CooTek.

CooTek and TouchPal

Founded in 2008 by three former Microsoft employees, Shanghai-based CooTek had raised $13.5 million to develop a smartphone app called TouchPal which autocorrects typos and predicts your next word with higher accuracy than that drivel that Android’s type predictor spits out. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here, what we’re talking about is “