After being placed on the Biden administration's investment blacklist, SenseTime, the Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn, postponed its US$767 million Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) on Monday.

In a filing submitted to Hong Kong Stock Exchange, SenseTime said it would postpone the listing "to safeguard the interests of the potential investors of the company" and allow them to "consider the potential impact of" the US move on any investments.

Investors in Hong Kong who had already applied to take part in the IPO will receive refunds, the company said, adding that it's still dedicated to completing the offering and that it will issue a supplemental prospectus as well as an updated listing timeframe.

Last Friday, the pricing of SenseTime's stock offering in Hong Kong did not take place as scheduled, due to the news that the IPO-bound Chinese AI unicorn had been added to a trading blacklist by the US.

On the same day, the US Treasury Department confirmed that it had decided to add SenseTime on a list of "Chinese military-industrial complex companies" in which US President Joe Biden has barred Americans from investing.

Founded by a group of professors at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2014, SenseTime is one of the world’s largest and most valuable facial recognition and computer vision startups. Its monetization channels include selling the smart city, surveillance, and self-driving driving applications to governments and companies.

SenseTime's Beijing subsidiary is already on the Entity List, which was initiated by the Trump administration to prohibit selected Chinese companies from purchasing American products or importing American technology without special permission.

SenseTime, together with Megvii, CloudWalk, and Yitu, has been dubbed one of China's four "AI Dragons." So far, the firm has raised a whopping US$5.2 billion in 12 rounds of financing. Its biggest outside shareholders include SoftBank Vision Fund and Alibaba’s Taobao.

According to CrunchBase, SenseTime has raised US$620 million in its Series C financing completed in May 2018. US institutional investors Fidelity International, Silver Lake, and Tiger Global Management participated in this round of financing that valued the AI upstart at more than US$4.5 billion.

Prior to the postponement of the listing, the business was scheduled to begin trading in Hong Kong on December 17. As of last week, SenseTime was planning to price shares between $HK3.85 and $HK3.99, which would have put its valuation at approximately $17 billion at the top end of the range.