Domestic emerging AI large model company Leap Star recently announced significant news, having completed hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. This round of financing was led by Fortera Capital, a private equity investment institution under the Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment and Operation Platform, with participation from well-known institutions such as Tencent and Qiming Venture Partners.
This AI company, established just over a year ago, was founded by Jiang Daxin, the former chief scientist at Microsoft Research Asia, in April 2023. As a leading AI model developer in China, Leap Star has made groundbreaking progress in the field of multimodal large language models.
Earlier this year, the company launched the Step-1V multimodal large model with over 100 billion parameters, and the currently testing Step-2 model is expected to exceed one trillion parameters. In the field of large language models, the scale of parameters is a key indicator of model performance; a larger number of parameters means the model can adapt to more complex data patterns and make more accurate predictions.
The company stated that the funds from this round of financing will be used to enhance multimodal capability development, advance the model's advanced reasoning capabilities, and launch new consumer-oriented products based on the foundational model.
It is noteworthy that Leap Star's financing represents the continued investment boom in China's AI sector. Just a week ago, Zhizhu AI also announced the completion of 3 billion RMB in financing, with investors including several state-owned investment institutions, Tencent, Alibaba, Qiming Venture Partners, and Lenovo Capital. According to Chinese media reports, after this round of financing, Zhizhu AI's valuation has exceeded 20 billion RMB.
This series of financings indicates that China is accelerating its layout in the AI sector, with the joint entry of state-owned capital and technology giants providing strong momentum for the development of domestic AI technology.
