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To say that Meng Xing, V.P. and entrepreneur-in-residence at Chinese venture firm Shunwei Capital, has been busy would be a gross understatement. Over the past ten years, the 31-year-old venture capitalist and entrepreneur has founded two artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups, selling one, an image recognition AI company, to Amazon and the other to a listed Chinese company. In between, he worked as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan Hong Kong and casino giant Caesars Entertainment, on top of getting an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. In March 2016, Meng joined Shunwei, a US$2 billion venture firm co-established by Chinese billionaire entrepreneur and Xiaomi Inc's founder Lei Jun. He has so far screened over 200 Chinese AI start-ups and led efforts to invest in nine AI companies during the past year. While Meng's first success was in image recognition, he believes that a stand-alone image recognition type of business popping up in China will face increasing challenges going forward. In order to survive and thrive, Chinese AI companies must focus on a niche vertical industry and create niche products, he says. Rather than simply creating AI technology, they want a company that is applying artificial intelligence for a specific purpose. The industries most likely to create the next great tech companies are financial technology, healthcare, surveillance, agriculture and autonomous driving, in his view. Meng spoke to China Money Network's Nina Xiang on the sidelines of the Montgomery Summit on March 9 in Santa Monica, California. You can listen to our conversation above or read a Q&A below. Don't forget to subscribe to China Money Podcast for free in the iTunes store, or subscribe to China Money Network weekly newsletters. You can also subscribe to China Money Podcast's Youtube channel or Youku channel. Q: Can you give a brief introduction of Shunwei Capital? A: Shunwei was founded in 2011 by Lei Jun and Tuck Lye Koh, together we manage around US$2 billion in assets across three U.S. dollar funds and two RMB funds. Since 2011, we have invested in 200 companies across a lot of sectors including Internet of things devices, financial technology, agriculture, new real estates, and coming-of-age technologies. I personally focus on technology-driven companies, more specifically, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, visual reality and 3D structure, for early-stage funding rounds like series A and series B. Q: You had an interesting career before joining Shunwei. Tell us more about that? A: I started my career as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan Hong Kong in 2007 covering the telecom, media and technology (TMT) sector. Then I started a few companies, but the one that really took off was Orbeus in 2012 when I was getting my MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was a company based in Boston and we were doing image recognition and object recognition. It was later sold to Amazon in 2015. Then, I joined Caesars Entertainment, an international casino company, and was responsible for their Asian online gaming sector for two years. After Caesars, I founded Cogtu, a start-up that leverages image recognition to build a native advertising network. The company was sold to a listed Chinese Internet company as well. And I joined Shunwei last year. Q: At Shunwei, you invest in AI start-ups. How many companies have you reviewed and what's your overview of these start-ups? A: Probably over 200 companies so far in the broadly defined artificial intelligence field, and we invested in about nine companies last year. When we are screening companies, first we want to know who are the founders. The good ones, or the ones that venture capitalists are chasing, are companies founded by research scientists from top research universities or research department from Google, Facebook and so forth. The problem is that those researchers have a lot of experience publishing ac...