Key Points
- AIsphere's Series C reached $439 million (RMB 2.98 billion) after an Alibaba-led extension.
- Post-money valuation tops $2 billion; total funding raised exceeds RMB 3.5 billion (~$515 million).
- PixVerse has passed 150 million registered users in 175-plus countries, with roughly 15 million monthly actives.
- Alibaba also led AIsphere's $60 million Series B, announced September 11, 2025.
Alibaba Group has led an extension round that brings the Series C of Chinese AI video startup AIsphere to a cumulative $439 million, or RMB 2.98 billion, Caixin reported on July 15. AI Insider and The Decoder put the post-money valuation above $2 billion; Caixin itself does not report a valuation.
Sorting out the names
The naming trips up most coverage, so it is worth setting straight first. AIsphere is the company, registered in China as 爱诗科技, Aishi Technology. PixVerse is its consumer product, the text-, image- and video-to-video generator it launched globally in January 2024; a separate domestic Chinese version of the app, PaiWo AI (拍我AI), shipped in June 2025. PixVerse R1 is the model AIsphere released in January 2026 and describes to Caixin as the first general-purpose real-time world model capable of 1080p output — video generation that responds to user input as a live stream rather than rendering a finished clip.
Headlines reading "PixVerse raises $439 million" are describing money that went to AIsphere.
What the round actually is
The $439 million is the cumulative Series C, not the size of the new tranche. AIsphere closed the first part of that round in March 2026, led by affiliates of CDH Investments with E-Town Capital and ZWC Partners, per Caixin. The two primary reports differ on Alibaba's role in what followed: Caixin says Alibaba led the extension that closed the round out, while DealStreetAsia describes Alibaba as among the new investors joining it.
The other new names in the extension, per DealStreetAsia: Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus and CloudAlpha. Existing backers iGlobe Partners and OCBC's LionX Ventures also returned. No outlet has reported the extension's standalone size, and the company has not disclosed it — the $439 million total and the $2 billion-plus valuation are the only hard numbers attached to it. Caixin puts AIsphere's total funding across all rounds at more than RMB 3.5 billion, roughly $515 million.
This is not Alibaba's first check. It led AIsphere's $60 million Series B, announced September 11, 2025, alongside Antler, the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Fortune Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group and Giant Network — at the time the largest single round raised by a Chinese AI video generation firm. That round is a separate, earlier event from this one, and the two are frequently conflated. Alibaba has now backed two AIsphere rounds in under a year while continuing to build its own frontier models in-house, including the Qwen3.7-Max agent model it released in May.
Who runs it and what the money is for
AIsphere was founded in April 2023 by Wang Changhu, formerly of Microsoft Research Asia and ByteDance, where he worked on computer vision, with co-founder Jaden Xie, previously an executive director at Lighthouse Capital. It is now headquartered in Singapore with offices in Beijing and Shanghai, and runs a team of roughly 150 people.
The stated use of proceeds spans four lines: foundational video generation models, real-time world models, global consumer product growth, and industrial deployment. On the last of those, AI Insider reports the company plans to expand enterprise partnerships globally — including an existing deployment agreement with Alibaba — while shipping new video and world-model products and growing the team. Leadership attributes its edge to data-labeling techniques carried over from Wang's visual recognition work at ByteDance. AIsphere's own site frames the mission as building a global video ecosystem.
The revenue gap the valuation is betting against
PixVerse has passed 150 million registered users across more than 175 countries, but monthly actives sit at roughly 15 million, and the last annualized run rate AIsphere disclosed was above $40 million, as of October 2025 — a figure Caixin repeated in its report on this round.
For comparison, BigGo Finance, aggregating Chinese-language coverage of the round, put Kling AI — Kuaishou's video unit — at roughly $500 million in annualized revenue as of the first quarter of 2026, and HeyGen above $200 million. On those figures PixVerse's disclosed revenue is under a tenth of Kling's, on a registered user base more than twice the size. The same report has PixVerse's monthly actives flat in the 15-to-16 million range for about nine months.
Why Chinese conglomerates keep writing these checks
Caixin frames the investment as part of "a widening race among the country's internet conglomerates to fill gaps in their multimodal AI capabilities." Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance have all moved on video and world models over the past year, in-house or through stakes in outside labs.
ByteDance, Google DeepMind, Runway, Luma and Midjourney are all pushing video and world models, while OpenAI shut Sora down and exited video generation in March, and Meta and Tencent have struggled to ship high-quality video models of their own. The same market pushed Together AI to an $8.3 billion valuation on an $800 million Series C earlier this month.
Others covering this
The Decoder — "PixVerse's $2B valuation shows investors still believe AI video generation has room for another winner"
"Singapore-based AI video startup PixVerse is now valued at over $2 billion after an extended Series C round."
DealStreetAsia — "PixVerse's Series C reaches $439m as Alibaba joins extension round"
"Existing investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC's LionX Ventures participated."
AI Insider — "PixVerse Raises $439M Series C Extension at Over $2B Valuation to Expand AI Video and World Model Business"
"PixVerse, a Singapore-based AI video-generation startup, closed a Series C extension totaling $439 million, pushing its valuation above $2 billion…"
Source: Caixin Global
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