AI Startup AISphere Secures 300M RMB in Funding Rounds

AISphere announced today the completion of Series A2 to A4 financing rounds, totaling nearly 300 million RMB. The Series A2 financing was invested by Ant Group; while the recent Series A3 and A4 financing rounds were invested by Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, CAS Investment, and Lighthouse Capital.

AISphere stated that this round of financing will be mainly used to enhance technical research and development capabilities, expand computing resources, build a talent team, accelerate product feature iterations and market coverage, and continuously promote the inclusiveness of AI video generation technology.

Founded in April 2023, AISphere focuses on developing AI video large models and applications. Its overseas product, PixVerse, was officially launched in January 2024, supporting text-based video functions and generating videos of a few seconds in length. According to the data statistics website Similarweb, PixVerse’s traffic surpassed one million in February. The Chinese version of PixVerse, “Aishi Video Large Model”, has also been filed and entered the internal testing phase on March 11th.

The founder of AISphere, Wang Changhu, graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China and has held positions including Director Researcher at Microsoft Asia Research Institute, Technical Director of ByteAI Lab, and Head of Byte Vision Technology.

In July 2024, AISphere globally released PixVerse V2. Compared to V1, the upgraded version introduces a self-developed spatiotemporal attention mechanism, enhancing spatial and temporal perception capabilities, making video generation longer, more consistent, and more interesting. It also supports three generation modes: text-generated video, image-generated video, and character-generated video.

This month, PixVerse V3.5 has entered the internal testing phase, with generation times reduced to less than 30 seconds, significant improvements in prompt word response and motion control capabilities, and is set to be officially launched soon.

As of now, AISphere’s core AI video generation product PixVerse has over 12 million users globally, with nearly 6 million monthly active users. Since the release of PixVerse V3 in October 2024, creative effects like “Venom Transformation” have swept social media platforms at home and abroad, providing unprecedented AI video generation experiences for millions of users.

Wang Changhu has previously stated that the emergence of Sora validates that AISphere’s video generation large models based on Diffusion+Transformer can achieve superior performance, reaffirming AISphere’s future direction. The company plans to focus manpower and resources to surpass Sora’s current level within 3-6 months.

“Based on the team’s past experience at Byte and leading industry-level technology, we are confident in creating the world’s best video large models and a national-level AI Native video application,” said Wang Changhu.

In terms of financing, in August 2023, AISphere completed a multi-million RMB angel round financing; in March of this year, AISphere announced that it had completed a billion RMB Series A1 financing, led by Dacheng Cai Zhi, with Lighthouse Capital as the exclusive financial advisor. Now, AISphere has once again completed a new 300 million RMB financing round.

Wang Changhu stated, “China’s short video platforms have led the development of mobile internet globally, where video large models not only compete in parameters and data but also focus on product value. We are confident in creating the leading AI video generation technology and application of this era, benefiting users worldwide.”

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