We Waited Fifteen Years for This National No.1
In March 2026, Diben Consulting, together with Internet Weekly and eNet Research Institute, released the 2026 Classification Rankings of Recognition Technology Companies.
In the Top 10 Iris Recognition Technology Companies list, Homsh ranked first.
Right behind us were Hikvision, IrisKing, and SenseTime.
It would be a lie to say we weren’t thrilled.
In 2011, We Had Nothing But an Algorithm
That winter in Wuhan, WuHan Homsh Technology Co., Ltd. had just been registered and established.
Our founder, Dr. Yi Kaijun, earned his PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, and spent years working on chip R&D at the Singapore National Academy of Sciences and Philips. He returned to China with a firm conviction: the future of iris recognition lies not in software, but in chips.
The first project he submitted to the Optics Valley 3551 Talent Program was an iris smart lock.
It took seven years for that lock to finally enter mass production.
No One Wanted to Work With Us
In the early days, we took our iris modules to lock manufacturers across the country.
The response we got was brutally pragmatic: "Fingerprint locks have steady annual shipments of hundreds of thousands of units. Iris? Never heard of it. Never seen it. We’re not taking that gamble."
We searched for six months, and not a single company was willing to cooperate.
Yi Kaijun made a decision: We’ll do it ourselves.
"Let’s build this first. Once we find customers and gain recognition from the industry, other companies will come around."
And so, against all odds, Homsh — originally a chip and algorithm company — built out a complete product line, handling design, manufacturing, and sales all on our own. That’s how the Airuishi Iris Smart Lock was born.
The Tenacity of a Single Chip
When it comes to iris recognition, the hardest part is not the algorithm, but the chip.
In the past, a single imported iris chip cost 1,600 yuan. Even in bulk purchases, the price was 400 yuan per unit, while the actual production cost was far lower. But at that time, China had no homegrown iris chip of its own.
Homsh chose the hardest path: to build our own.
From the first-generation FPGA chip QX100, to the world's first ASIC chip dedicated to iris biometric recognition — the QX8001.
Fifteen years, four generations of chips. With each generation, we turned the "impossible" into mass production.
300 Intellectual Property Rights: Not the Finish Line
To date, Homsh has accumulated more than 300 intellectual property rights, with our core algorithm winning the Hubei Provincial Patent Gold Award.
But for us, patents are never just certificates hung on the wall.
Behind every patent lies a solved engineering challenge, a heart-stopping leap from the laboratory to the production line.
What Does the No.1 Ranking Mean?
To be honest, the ranking is just one snapshot of our work.
What it proves is that the industry has finally realized one thing: to do iris recognition well, you can’t just focus on software — you have to build the chip. And Homsh is the only iris recognition enterprise in China with full independent control over the entire industrial chain, from algorithm to chip.
Fifteen years ago, iris recognition was a term we had to explain to people over and over again.
Today, it is a must-have technology for security, finance, and smart access.
And we’ve been here since day one.
The Next Fifteen Years
Yi Kaijun once said:
"Technology is always just technology, and it burns money. Once you want to turn technology into a product, you have to immerse yourself in every aspect of product building."
Homsh’s next step is not to hold onto the No.1 spot, but to drive the cost of iris recognition down to the same level as fingerprint recognition, making this technology truly integrated into everyone’s daily life.
A single glance is all it takes.
Data Source: 2026 Classification Rankings of Recognition Technology Companies by Diben Consulting, Internet Weekly, and eNet Research Institute
