(Yicai Global) Sept. 8 -- DeepBrain, a project merging artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies, obtained USD4.92 million (CNY32 million) from investors including venture capital firms GSR Ventures Management Co. and Gobi Partners Inc. in its first financing round.

Upon securing the funding, DeepBrain said it will establish a laboratory with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai branch. The two groups will jointly develop core technologies such as natural language understanding, multi-round dialogue management, question-and-answer systems and blockchain technologies, 36kr.com reported yesterday.

DeepBrain mainly provides hardware manufacturers with semantics libraries, an AI man-machine dialog engine, robot component functions, big data analysis tools and home interconnection systems.

Its core business is its semantics library, a platform that provides voice interaction applications similar to those Amazon Inc.'s [NASDAQ:AMZN] Alexa uses. With its semantics library, DeepBrain's technology can take voice, image, text and other inputs and apply them to create third party applications.

DeepBrain introduced its AI cloud platform in May and offered more than 1,000 semantic skills on it by the end of June with a focus on audio and childhood education. DeepBrain is preparing a developer contest that it expects will help it increase that number to over 3,000 this year.

The group has created a system that leverages blockchains to strengthen AI technology. The enterprise works with Samsung Group, Lenovo Group Ltd. [HK:0992] and many other manufacturers.