According to a announcement on Wednesday, the Beijing-based startup behind popular artificial intelligence video generator Pixverse raised US$60 million in a funding round led by Alibaba Group Holding, the largest single volume raised by the domestic AI video generation company.
Other participants in the funding round include Singapore-headquartered venture capital firm Antler and Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. No evaluation has been revealed.
The deal comes as a large Chinese tech company is looking at niche AI startups to complement their own products and final products.
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Founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft and Bytedance executive Wang Changhu, Aisphere's video creation product allows users to easily generate videos from text prompts, images and other video clips.
The new fund will support R&D and continue to expand globally, the startup said.
Kuaishou unveiled the Kling AI 2.0 model in April. Photo: Ben Jiang Alt = Kuaishou unveiled the Kling AI 2.0 model in April. Photo: Ben Jiang>
Pixverse now has more than 100 million users worldwide, more than twice the number at the beginning of the year. The “Venom Effect” video template went viral on Tiktok at the end of last year.
Artificial Analysis from AI benchmark companies ranked the latest model V5 from the Pixverse, which was released in late August. It has been launched worldwide as an industry-leading model for image-to-video generation, beating Google Deepmind's VEO 3.
Last month, Pixverse ranked 25th in the list of top 50 generation AI consumer apps by the Silicon Valley Venture Capital Firm A16Z.
“The emergence of video generation technology is no coincidence. It is an inevitable product of the long-term evolution of content and interaction methods, deriving a new era,” Wang said in a statement.
“The early market consensus on large-scale video generation models provides a wider space for opportunities for exploration and innovation, and can more subtlely rob the opportunities of our time,” he said.
The startup previously raised more than US$55 million in several rounds, with investors including Ant Group, Lighthouse Capital and Eminence Venture.
The move marked Alibaba's latest foray into video generation, following Aisphere's investments in competitors and in its own models. Other Chinese tech companies have released new video generation products in recent weeks, including Bytedance's Jimeng AI and Kuaishou Technology's Kling AI.
