Chinese AI company DeepBlue Technology Co Ltd (Shanghai) is expanding into overseas markets, especially those in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The moves are designed to boost the application of cutting-edge AI technology in different business scenarios around the world.

DeepBlue Tech inked an agreement with the Foundation Magna Grecia, an Italian financial institution, last March 21, to create a local subsidiary and help Italian cities to embrace the digital dimension using AI. DeepBlue Italy will boost the country’s AI push. It will supply products relating to Big Data, data analytics and AI that will become part of city infrastructure, besides tapping into industries like financial services, transportation, tourism, hospitality and medical in Italy.

DeepBlue Tech opened its European headquarters in Luxembourg last year, and established three joint laboratories with the National Laboratory of Luxembourg, covering self-driving, intelligent manufacturing, and data and financial security.

“We have signed cooperation agreements with the governments of Greece and Italy in the field of intelligent cities, and plan to introduce our palm vein recognition system in at least three European countries this year,” said Chen Haibo, founder and CEO of DeepBlue Tech.

Chen explained palm vein recognition, which is expected to be applied in the customs and medical fields in Greece, is preferred over facial recognition system in light of the European privacy protection laws. Incidentally, the company exported smart vending machines to Europe last year.

The company has intellectual property rights over proprietary technologies like deep learning architecture, machine vision, and biological intelligent recognition.  These find applications in fields like self-driving vehicles, intelligent robots, biological intelligence, smart retail, security, life sciences and AI chips.

The company remains cautious toward making inroads into the US market, although a lot of its R&D staff graduated from US universities. “Our technology has an upper hand in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and there are relatively few barriers for our products in these markets,” Chen said.

The company’s smart Panda Bus, powered with self-driving technology, palm vein recognition system, in-vehicle robot, voice interaction and other advanced AI technologies, will be launched in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, by the middle of this year. The luxury bus uses high-grade self-driving technology based on AI, which provides passengers with more comfortable experiences.

A Panda Bus can take full control and operate in select parts of a preset journey in a certain geography when certain operating conditions are met. At other times, it is capable of completing an entire journey without driver intervention. One of its constraints is it will be confined to a certain geographical area.

The bus received enthusiastic support from users in certain markets. Countries such as Germany, Luxembourg, Italy and Greece have shown much interest in this product. It is expected that the smart Panda Bus will be available in Europe later this year, DeepBlue Tech executives said.

“The self-driving bus has entered six cities across China: Changzhou (Jiangsu province), Jinan (Shandong province), Quzhou (Zhejiang province), Deyang (Sichuan province), Chizhou (Anhui province) and Tianjin,” Chen said.