The big model unicorn "StepStar" has completed a Series B financing of several hundred million US dollars.
Written by Zhou Xinyu
Edited by Su Jianxun
The "winter funds" for the "Six Tigers" of large models are gradually being in place.
"Intelligent Emergence" exclusively learned that Chinese large model unicorn StepStar has recently completed its Series B financing, with a total financing amount of several hundred million US dollars. This financing involves multiple participants including state-owned capital, strategic and financial investors. The core investors include Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its funds, and the strategic and financial investors include Tencent Investment, FiveYuan Capital, Qiming Venture Capital, etc.
It is understood that this financing will be used to continue investing in the research and development of basic models, strengthening multimodal and complex reasoning capabilities, and expanding the coverage of C-end application scenarios through products and ecosystems to provide a rich user experience.
Among the "Six Tigers (Zhipu, StepStar, MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, ZeroOne Everything, Baichuan Intelligence)", StepStar's most distinctive label is: solid technology.
"Crossing the river by feeling the stones of OpenAI" is the development path chosen by many domestic large model companies. Jiang Daxin, the CEO of StepStar, once told "Intelligent Emergence" that just like from ChatGPT to Sora, "Single modality - Multimodal - Unification of multimodal understanding and generation - World model - AGI (General Artificial Intelligence)", this is the development route that StepStar has planned since its establishment.
However, as the technical capabilities and resource levels reach a bottleneck period, many domestic manufacturers have slowed down or given up the exploration of AGI.
StepStar is currently a model layer company that rarely follows the AGI exploration route and maintains efficient technical iteration and output.
According to statistics, in the past 10 months, StepStar has released a total of 11 self-developed base models, with modalities including language (hundreds of billions of parameters and trillions of parameters), image understanding, video understanding, image generation, video generation, voice replication and generation, and speech recognition.
While maintaining a high-frequency model output, StepStar still ensures the capabilities of the model.
In the LiveBench evaluation list released on November 19, 2024, StepStar's self-developed trillion-parameter language large model Step-2 ranks first among domestic base large models, second only to OpenAI o1 and Claude;
On November 22, the newly released LMSYS Chatbot Arena list shows that StepStar's multimodal understanding large model Step-1V ranks first among Chinese large models in the visual field.
The solid technical capabilities have also accumulated word-of-mouth for the commercialization of the Step series models. "Intelligent Emergence" learned that In the second half of 2024, the invocation volume of StepStar's multimodal API increased by more than 45 times.
Among them, the Step series models have accumulated a group of active application developers. For example, AI applications such as "Lyrics Remix Machine", "The Book of Stomach", and "Forest Healing Room" that have become popular on social networks, all invoke StepStar's multimodal model behind the scenes.
Zhao Chunxiang, the developer of "The Book of Stomach", once said that the product went through an "A/B test" when choosing a model. Finally, it was found that after accessing StepStar's multimodal model, the product had the highest payment rate.
The key factor for the "powerful" technology lies in the talent density of StepStar. "Large models are not a human wave tactic," Jiang Daxin told "Intelligent Emergence", "The height of a few people at the top of the pyramid determines the height of the entire model."
As the vice president and chief scientist of Microsoft Asia Internet Engineering Research Institute (STCA), Jiang Daxin is a scholar with great talent appeal.
In the construction of the large model team, Jiang Daxin has his own judgment on the core elements: "System, algorithm and data."
One of the core members of StepStar is Zhu Yibo, the former director of ByteDance. He is also one of the few AI system experts in China with rich experience in large-scale cluster and system construction. The core members in the company's data and algorithm aspects include Jiao Binxing from Microsoft STCA and AI scientist Zhang Xiangyu, one of the authors of ResNet.
The mature team configuration has allowed StepStar to avoid many detours in model training. A typical case is: The hundred-billion-parameter model Step-1 started training on July 1, 2023, and completed the training at the end of August, and it was a rare one-time success.
Nowadays, extending from the model layer to the application layer is the business strategy of large model manufacturers to expand revenue generation scale, collect data and user feedback. The product strategy adopted by StepStar is "self-research + ecological cooperation".
In the layout of self-developed products, StepStar has launched the intelligent assistant "Yuewen". The multimodal intelligent visual search function "Take a Picture and Ask", based on the self-developed visual understanding model, is the first large model product function integrated into the camera control button of iPhone 16 in China.
In the early stage of the large model landing, cooperating with downstream industry customers to find PMF is a more efficient way to "aim at the nail" and understand market needs. In professional fields such as finance and economics, content creation and intelligent terminals, StepStar chooses to deeply cooperate and create with the leading companies in each field.
For example, it jointly established the large model technology company "Caiyue Xingchen" with Jiemian CaiLianShe under Shanghai United Media Group, and launched the vertical large model Finstep for the financial industry and the C-end private wealth assistant "Little God of Wealth"; in the field of intelligent terminals, it has become a large model technology partner of leading mobile phone manufacturers such as Honor and OPPO.
The current investment market environment for large models is highly competitive. An investor who has been continuously following up on the financing of large models said that being able to finalize a new round of financing at this time and gain the favor of many well-known and professional investment institutions with different attributes indicates that the capital market is optimistic about the technical leadership, product differentiation and commercialization potential of StepStar's base model, and the balanced shareholder structure will also give StepStar more room for development in the future.
Within a week, Zhipu and StepStar have successively finalized a new round of financing, and the competition among the Six Tigers has entered the finals.
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