The domestic large model unicorn company, Leap Star, recently announced the completion of its Series B financing, with a total amount reaching several hundred million dollars, attracting significant attention from the industry. This round of financing saw participation from many heavyweight investors, including Shanghai State-Owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its subsidiary funds leading the investment, along with well-known institutions such as Tencent Investment, Wuyuan Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners joining as co-investors. This substantial funding will primarily be used to accelerate the research and development of foundational models, focusing on enhancing multimodal and complex reasoning capabilities, while further expanding the C-end application market.
The CEO of Leap Star, Jiang Daxin, stated that the company's development path is similar to OpenAI's trajectory from "ChatGPT to Sora," both aiming to evolve from unimodal to multimodal, and ultimately achieving a unified understanding and generation across multiple modalities, with the goal of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Currently, Leap Star has launched the intelligent assistant "Yuewen" and has made significant progress in the multimodal field. Its "Photo Question" feature, based on a self-developed visual understanding model, is the first large model product feature integrated into the iPhone 16 camera control button in China, allowing users to ask questions directly by taking photos, greatly enhancing interaction efficiency. Additionally, according to reports from IT Home, Leap Star also released the Step-1, an end-to-end voice large model with 100 billion parameters this month, claiming to be "the first end-to-end voice large model with 100 billion parameters in China," further showcasing its strong capabilities in the voice domain.
The completion of this financing undoubtedly injects new vitality into Leap Star amid fierce market competition. It will be interesting to see how the company continues to break new ground in the multimodal and AGI fields in the future.
