(Image credit: Photo by Lin Zhijia, TMTPost AGI Editor)

TMTPOST -- Chinese AI unicorn Stepfun has has completed a new round of funding, raising several hundred million dollars. The round attracted a diverse group of investors, including state-owned capital, strategic backers, and financial investors. Core investors include Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co. and its affiliated funds, as well as Tencent Investments, 5Y Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners, among others.

This round of financing will be used to continue investing in foundational model research, enhancing multi-modal and complex reasoning capabilities, and expanding coverage of C-end application scenarios through products and ecosystems to provide a rich user experience. 

Stepfun was founded in April 2023, headquartered in Xuhui, Shanghai, and is committed to achieving AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It was founded by Jiang Daxin, former Global Vice President of Microsoft. 

Since the launch of its Step series models in March 2024, Stepfun has released 11 self-developed base models, including the Step-1 and Step-2 language models, and the industry’s first trillion-parameter language model by a Chinese startup. On November 19, Step-2 topped the LiveBench rankings, marking it as the first Chinese-language model to break into the top 10. 

The company has also made strategic moves in the consumer sector with the “Yue Wen” app, which includes a multimodal visual search feature embedded in the iPhone 16 camera. Furthermore, Stepfun has formed strategic partnerships with companies like Zhongwen Online, Honor, and OPPO to provide AI solutions in sectors such as finance, content creation, and smart terminals.

Industry data indicates that Stepfun’s multimodal API usage surged more than 45 times in the second half of 2024. CEO Jiang said that the path to AGI will pass through three stages, culminating in the integration of multimodal understanding and generation into a single model, which will pave the way for embodied intelligence.

The current investment environment for large models is fiercely competitive, with the "Six Tigers of Large Models" (Baichuan Intelligence, Zhipu AI, 01.ai, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, Stepfun) experiencing divergent paths in their development: Baichuan is shifting its focus to AI doctors, Zhipu is targeting the implementation of AI Agents and model APIs, 01.ai is concentrating on overseas profitability, Moonshot AI is investing in traffic to improve retention rates for its Kimi smart assistant, MiniMax is betting on consumer products and international markets, while Stepfun continues to enhance its model capabilities and expand coverage of consumer application scenarios. Meanwhile, ByteDance's Doubao is exerting some pressure on the Six Tigers with its extensive layout in the AI large model industry chain.