Crazy! Startup company received over 1 billion USD in financing within one year of its establishment

In recent years, the AI ​​big model track has risen strongly, especially after ChatGPT became popular last year. This track has ushered in huge business opportunities. AI startups have been advancing by leaps and bounds, attracting the attention of the capital market.

"Dark Side of the Moon" completes a new round of financing of over US$1 billion

Recently, AI startup Dark Side of the Moon announced that it has completed a new round of financing of over 1 billion US dollars. Investors include Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan Strategic Investment Department, Alibaba, etc., and old shareholders from the previous round continue to invest.

It is worth mentioning that this is the largest single round of financing obtained by a domestic AI large model company since ChatGPT became popular. After this round of financing, the valuation of "Dark Side of the Moon" has reached about 2.5 billion US dollars, making it one of the leading companies in the field of large models in China.

Public information shows that Beijing Moonshot Al Technology Co., Ltd. was established in April 2023. It is an AIGC company whose main business is AGI (artificial general intelligence). The company is committed to seeking the optimal solution for converting energy into intelligence and creating intelligence with users through products.

Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin is a top student who graduated from Tsinghua University, and the company's core members Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin also graduated from Tsinghua. The team has overseas talents from giants such as Google, Meta, and Amazon, and many team members have experience in training super-large models and have participated in the research and development of multiple large models such as Google's artificial intelligence model Gemini, Google Bard, Pangu NLP, and Wudao. Many core technologies have been adopted by mainstream products such as Google PaLM, Meta LLaMa, and Stable Diffusion. In addition, the company's new members also have experience in products with hundreds of millions of DAU.

On June 11, 2023, when the company was only two months old, Dark Side of the Moon secured its first round of financing of over 200 million US dollars from investors including Sequoia China, Zhen Fund, etc.

In less than a year after Dark Side of the Moon was founded, it completed the layout from general large models to upper-level applications.

In terms of general large models, Dark Side of the Moon has trained a self-developed general large model with a scale of hundreds of billions.

At present, the business model of Dark Side of the Moon is to develop To-C products.

In October 2023, Dark Side of the Moon released its first large-scale model, moonshot, and the smart assistant product Kimi Chat equipped with this model, which achieved a breakthrough in the field of "long text" and was Dark Side of the Moon's first attempt to become a To-C super application.

Kimi Chat is the first intelligent assistant product that supports the input of 200,000 Chinese characters. It has a huge knowledge base and focuses on lossless memory. Dark Side of the Moon claims that 200,000 Chinese characters is the longest context input length that can be supported by large model services that can be used in products in the global market.

Kimi Chat has a clear advantage in Chinese, and can support contexts of about 200,000 Chinese characters in actual use. Anthropic's Claude-100k supports about 80,000 characters in actual tests, while Kimi Chat supports 2.5 times that; OpenAI's GPT-4-32k supports about 25,000 characters in actual tests, while Kimi Chat supports 8 times that.

An old shareholder of Dark Side of the Moon said that compared with other ChatGPT products in China, the information quality provided by Kimi Chat is very good.

The game application "Honghong Simulator" is connected to the large model of the Dark Side of the Moon. The game designs various types of couple interaction scenarios, and users can customize roles and dialogue scenes, and use AI characters to simulate real dialogues.

At present, the number of online users of this game has exceeded 10,000, and over 100 million tokens have been consumed at a very fast speed.

It is understood that Dark Side of the Moon is currently secretly developing a universal multimodal model, which is expected to be launched within this year.

Industry insiders predict that Dark Side of the Moon will use overseas markets as its main commercialization battlefield and assume the function of "making money" for the company.

From the job information released by Dark Side of the Moon, we can also see that Dark Side of the Moon is already preparing for overseas market launches and other positions. Discord community is the main channel for the growth of AI product communities. The Discord community of Dark Side of the Moon has already started operating and has accumulated nearly 6,000 fans.

With the support of capital, the future development prospects of Dark Side of the Moon are worth looking forward to.

The domestic AI big model track has set off a financing wave

Since last year, with the explosive popularity of ChatGPT, a wave of AI big models has swept the world, and the domestic AI big model market size has also ushered in rapid growth.

According to the latest data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China's application scenarios will continue to expand in 2023, and it is estimated that the market size of large models in China will reach 13.23 billion yuan in 2023, with a growth rate of up to 110%.

Since last year, the domestic AI big model track has set off round after round of financing.

In addition to Dark Side of the Moon, the current leading companies in the domestic AI big model track include Zhipu AI, MiniMax, Zero One Everything, and Baichuan Intelligence.

These companies have outstanding financing capabilities in 2023 and have attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Zhipu AI

Founded in 2019, Zhipu AI is a company focusing on the research and development and application of large AI models.

In 2019, the company received angel round financing worth hundreds of millions of yuan. In 2021, it received another Pre-A round of financing worth hundreds of millions of yuan.

In 2023, Zhipu AI received more than 2.5 billion yuan in financing, and the company's valuation reached 10 billion yuan.

According to media reports, Zhipu AI is conducting a new round of financing with a valuation of 20 billion yuan.

MiniMax

Founded in November 2021, MiniMax is the only startup in China that has a general large model engine capability that integrates text, voice, and images, and has opened up the entire product chain.

It is understood that MiniMax's founding team was previously active in Silicon Valley, the United States. When OpenAI released GPT-3, they captured the development potential of large models and decided to return to China to start a business.

In June 2023, MiniMax completed a new round of financing of over US$250 million, and the company's current valuation exceeds US$1.2 billion.

Previously, MiniMax had completed two rounds of financing, with investors including miHoYo, IDG Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Yunqi Capital, and Mingshi Capital.

Zero One Everything

Founded in May 2023, Zero One Everything focuses on developing large language models. Its founder Kai-Fu Lee was once the global vice president of Google and Microsoft. The open-source basic large language model Yi-34B by Zero One Everything is now available in Chinese and English to developers around the world.

In November 2023, only half a year after its establishment, Zero One Wanwu announced that it had completed an angel round of financing led by Alibaba Cloud with a valuation of over US$1 billion. The amount of financing was not disclosed.

Baichuan Intelligence

Baichuan Intelligence was founded on April 10, 2023 by former Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan. The company is committed to breakthroughs in language AI, and its main business direction is to develop and provide general artificial intelligence services.

At the beginning of its business, Baichuan Intelligence announced that it had obtained US$50 million in angel round financing with personal support from Wang Xiaochuan and his friends in the industry.

On October 17, 2023, Baichuan Intelligence announced that it had received a US$300 million investment in its A1 round, with participation from technology giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Shenzhen Capital Group and many well-known venture capital institutions.

After this round, Baichuan Intelligence’s total financing amount reached US$350 million.

In general, the AI ​​big model track has not only attracted the participation of many companies, but has also become a new favorite in the investment community. In the future, as the demand at the application level drives the accelerated development of the AI ​​industry, it may bring about explosive growth in the market.

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