One of Megvii’s early successes came in 2015, when Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial used its technology to launch a feature called Smile to Pay. Megvii now provides facial recognition to government surveillance projects in China, and face authentication to banks and smartphone manufacturers, including Oppo, which Counterpoint Research says is the world’s fifth-largest phone maker by shipments. Megvii’s researchers regularly win academic contests for computer vision algorithms and have defeated competitors from Google and Microsoft.