Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse today announced that it has raised a total of $439 million in a round and completed its Series C expansion. The company told TechCrunch that the new funding brings its valuation to more than $2 billion. The company aims to use the funding to expand its global model offering and reach customers in different regions.
The company closed its first Series C round led by CDH Investments in March. The amount raised was not disclosed, but Bloomberg reported it was in the range of $300 million. According to PixVerse, investors in the extended round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, with returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures.
The company was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie. Mr. Changhu previously worked in computer vision at ByteDance, and Mr. Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.
PixVerse offers multiple models, including the V-Series Video Model for consumer and API usage, the C-Series Video Model for professional film and commercial workflows, and the R-Series World Model for game development and world-building released earlier this year.
The company’s tools allow users to generate videos of up to 4K resolution with embedded audio. The company says its consumer products have more than 150 million registered users and more than 15 million monthly active users. The company wouldn’t say how many of those are paying users, but it does offer a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute for image-to-video production.
Xie believes that although there is a huge opportunity for success in video generation, only a few companies are making progress in the market.
“OpenAI went out of business with the closure of Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent cannot create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality standards,” he told TechCrunch.
He said there is an equal opportunity between consumer and enterprise markets, as users create videos as a hobby and also consume short video content created with AI, while businesses leverage video generation for creative, learning and marketing use cases.
But to say that a startup model produces “high-quality” output is by no means a special qualifier. Xie said its core strength lies in labeling.
“We believe the key difference is not the data, but how we label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founders worked at ByteDance and used AI to build the core visual understanding technology behind TikTok. Using this technology, TikTok was able to accurately label data and build powerful recommendation algorithms. This experience will come in handy when building a video generation platform,” Xie said.
The company has big ambitions this year. The company wants to expand its corporate footprint around the world. The startup already has a deal with investor Alibaba to roll out video generation capabilities.
In terms of product rollouts, we plan to launch new V-series models for video generation this year and release a new version of our World model. The company has 150 employees in offices in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. With the new funding, PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and go-to-market talent.
Despite being confident in its models and products, the video market is heating up. Players include ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth, and Asia’s Kling AI. Western competitors include Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. Several companies, including startups from Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li, are building global models.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
