Alibaba leads $293m round in Chinese AI start-up after HappyHorse reveal

HappyHorse 1.0 shot up to the top ranks in the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.

Chinese technology giant Alibaba’s cloud division led a $293m funding round into ShengShu Technology, a 2023-founded Beijing-based start-up behind the Vidu AI video-generation tool.

Baidu Ventures and Luminous Ventures also participated in the round. The company’s post-money valuation has not been disclosed.

The latest investment comes after ShengShu raised nearly $88m in a Series A round in February.

Vidu is marketed towards independent creators and animators, promising “effortless” production of content with “diverse artistic styles”.

The start-up is focusing on building ‘world models’ built on multimodal data such as audio, video and “touch”. The latest funding, the company said, will help support the development of a “general world model”.

The company’s latest Vidu Q3 Pro, which launched in January, places at the seventh rank on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard on text-to-video models, while making it to the 10th spot on the image-to-video rankings.

Vidu competes with other Chinese AI heavyweights, including ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and lead investor Alibaba’s own video model HappyHorse 1.0 that shot up to the top rank on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.

Meanwhile, models from companies such as Singapore’s Skywork AI and Beijing-based Kuaishou, behind KlingAI, also rank high on the boards. These models are hungry to fill the gap in the video generation space left by OpenAI after it shuttered Sora late last month. Top leaderboard rankings are increasingly being filled by Chinese models.

HappyHorse was anonymously launched earlier this week before Alibaba claimed ownership today (10 April). The model is a product of Alibaba’s new Token Hub (ATH) innovation unit, placing number one on text-to-video and image-to-video ranks with no audio, while placing at the second spot with audio.

Bloomberg News reported that HappyHorse 1.0, which is under beta testing currently, will be followed up with more new ATH products. Alibaba’s share prices shot up following speculation that the company was behind the model.

Alibaba made the decision last month to bring its AI services and development works under a single roof called ATH, led by CEO Eddie Wu.

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