Huge news comes from the field of domestic AI large models! Unicorn company Step Star recently announced the completion of hundreds of millions of dollars in Series B financing, led by Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its funds, with participation from well-known institutions such as Tencent Investment, Wuyuan Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners. The large scale of this round of financing shows the capital market’s high recognition of Stepstar’s technical strength and future development prospects, and also indicates that domestic large-scale model competition will further intensify.
Domestic large-scale model unicorn company Step Star recently announced the completion of Series B financing, with a total amount of hundreds of millions of dollars, attracting great attention in the industry. This round of financing attracted the participation of many heavyweight investors, including Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its funds, which led the investment, and well-known institutions such as Tencent Investment, Wuyuan Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners followed. This huge amount of funds will be mainly used to accelerate the research and development of basic models, focusing on improving multi-modal and complex reasoning capabilities, and further expanding the C-side application market.
Jiang Daxin, CEO of Step Star, said that the company’s development route is similar to OpenAI’s “ChatGPT to Sora” path, both of which are committed to moving from single-modality to multi-modality, then to achieving the unification of multi-modal understanding and generation, and ultimately moving towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
At present, Step Star has launched the intelligent assistant "Yue Wen" and has made significant progress in the multi-modal field. Its "Photo Question" function based on a self-developed visual understanding model is the first large-scale product function in China to be integrated into the iPhone 16 camera control keys. Users can ask questions directly by taking pictures, greatly improving interaction efficiency. In addition, according to reports from IT House, Step Star also released the Step-1o 100 billion parameter end-to-end speech model this month, which is claimed to be "the first 100 billion parameter end-to-end speech model in China", further demonstrating the Its strong strength in the field of voice.
The completion of this financing will undoubtedly inject new vitality into the fierce market competition. It’s worth waiting to see how this company will continue to make breakthroughs in the fields of multi-modality and AGI in the future.
The success of Step Star's huge financing not only demonstrates its leading position in the field of artificial intelligence, but also injects strong impetus into the development of China's large model industry. In the future, we look forward to Step Star making greater breakthroughs on the road to general artificial intelligence and bringing users a more convenient and intelligent experience.