Unique Research · Company / financing · June 14, 2023
On June 7, 2023, AI digital-human solutions firm FOCO closed a multi-ten-million RMB angel round led exclusively by Sinovation Ventures (创新工场). Use of funds: tech team build-out and foundation R&D.
Founded Nov 2022 (Tsinghua/PKU-heavy team). End-to-end AI digital humans: (1) generation pipeline from text/image → “Hollywood industrial-grade” assets in any style; (2) real-time drive from voice/text replacing mocap + zhongzhiren pipelines for online/offline use. Target: hyper-real humans, creatures, cartoons — not 1:1 clones only — to serve fragmented scene demand.
CEO Zhou Yifu: Tsinghua Academy of Arts → USC film school MFA; ex-VP Digital Domain; credits include Hidden Man, Lost in Space, Faye Wong / TFBoys VR. High-precision digital-human DB (models, textures, motion) from VFX lineage. Clients: Poly Culture and large MCNs; culture-tourism projects feeding a data flywheel.
Sinovation: multimodal drive + hyper-real models + LLM/vision as HCI engine for social, games, XR in AI 2.0.
Images in CN (digital-human detail shots); attach on ingest. Author Jiacheng · Review Ski.
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