Xipeng Shen, CoCoPIE Co-Founder and CTO, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss how smart phones could become cheaper moving forward.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Let's talk about the iPhone industry, and really what we're seeing at large because of some of the chip shortage. Now, Apple earlier this week sending out invites to a launch event next week. We're largely expecting a new iPhone. But we've got a company that says get ready for cheaper smartphones. And they're also saying that the need to replace your phones every one to two years is going away.

So we want to talk about this with Xipeng Shen. He is CoCoPIE's co-founder. And Xipeng, it's good to have you. I guess you're looking to revolutionize the smartphone industry through your technology. Describe to us exactly what CoCoPIE does, and how you're planning to do this.

XIPENG SHEN: Yeah, thanks for having me. So CoCoPIE is a software company. It tries to enable AI on mobile devices and IoT devices through pure software solution. So this CoCoPIE technology, even mid-end or even lower-end devices like smartphones can achieve high-end mobile device performance, because our groundbreaking technology can accelerate AI applications and other applications to three to 30 times compared to the state at large.

JOSH SCHAFER: There's a concept, and help us understand what you mean. When you talk about proprietary DLA, you're talking about deep learning? And how does that work, if that's what it actually is, to enhance chips, and essentially just bring down the cost of a cell phone?

XIPENG SHEN: Right, so the context here is that modern applications, more and more, are relying on deep learning technology to deliver their smart services. Deep learning stands for some kind of deep neural network models. And these models have lots of millions of parameters, lots of computations. They require lots of computation power. So this is why the newer-generation phones have more and more powerful processors, to process these computations.

But with this CoCoPIE technology, a software solution can make these big neural networks much smaller, and also much faster even on low-end devices. So this is why these technologies can break the gap between lower-end processor computing power and these modern applications.

SEANA SMITH: You certainly are providing a technology that seems to be in high demand right now. Xipeng, who are some of your customers that you're working with?

XIPENG SHEN: Yeah, so we have been working with the customers from both a lot of software domains and also hardware demands. So including, for example, Tencent. Tencent has signed a big contract with CoCoPIE, so they are interested in using CoCoPIE technology to deliver AI applications and the real-time speed browser in Java phones. And also our customers include Cognizant. This is another big IT company which delivers also smart applications to their customers who may need them.

JOSH SCHAFER: I think Seana mentioned you just successfully closed that multimillion-dollar Series A funding round with Sequoia China's seed fund. Is any of that money, is any of the technology you're developing, is it-- and I may be out of the ballpark with it, but is it possible to use the software technology to upgrade the existing chip I might have in a phone, thereby relieving the shortage somehow?

XIPENG SHEN: Yes. So with this technology, we can make the phones, the applications on the phones, especially those computing-intensive applications, be able to run much faster or requires much lower computing power. And it can also consume much less energy. So our study shows that this CoCoPIE technology, some state-of-the-art AI applications can run two to 30 times faster, even on low-end or middle-end smartphones. These applications can outperform high-end AI devices. And at the same time, these technologies can make these apps run much more energy-efficiently, so you can save four to 18 times energy consumption.

SEANA SMITH: Xipeng Shen, co-founder of CoCoPIE, thanks so much for stopping by.