Unique Research · Insight / industry monthly · November 9, 2023 · Unique Research AIGC desk · Full editorial rewrite of ~10,221 CJK — all key facts, amounts, named rounds, and industry notes preserved (not a stub)
Contents: 01 Recent deal overview (1.1 Secondary · 1.2 Primary) · 02 Industry briefing (2.1 Global · 2.2 Domestic) · 03 AIGC track deep-dives · 04 Report statement.
01 · October deal overview
1.1 Secondary market
Per East Money data, as of 31 October the AIGC concept sector index closed at 1,412.97 (−4.38%), turnover RMB 404.982B, turnover rate 48.63%.
Top-5 gainers: iSoftStone (软通动力) 34.52 / +34.42%; Tianlong Group (天龙集团) 7.42 / +15.938%; Sunwave Communications (三维通信) 7.85 / +29.73%; Sinosoft (中科金财) 18.6 / +22.09%; Capitalonline (首都在线) 15.76 / +12.09%.
Tianlong Group (天龙集团)
Founded 1993; ChiNext-listed 2010 (SZ: 300063). After 20+ years: eco-friendly inks, forest chemical products, internet marketing services — 12 subsidiaries nationwide; pushing digital marketing. Actively laying out digital humans and innovative AIGC marketing; building the Tianlong AIGC Engine for intelligent creative assets and content — AI video edit, motion effects, image production — already commercialized, upgrading AI digital-marketing scenes.
Sunwave Communications (三维通信)
Founded 1993; listed Shenzhen 2007 (SZ: 002115); ~1,000 employees; 2022 revenue >RMB 10B. Wireless coverage, networks, security, satellite communications; subsidiaries also in internet digital marketing and facility leasing. Per 2022 annual report, subsidiary JuWang Tech launched AI apps — live-script robots, creative-asset auto-gen robots, content safety-review robots — aiding copy, assets, and review in internet advertising.
1.2 Primary market
In October 2023, global AIGC financing totaled RMB 4.52B across 33 deals — hotter than September. Globally, seed and Series A dominated volume. Highest single raise globally and in China context: Baichuan Intelligence (Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi). Deals above RMB 100M: 8 (24.24%). China AIGC financing: RMB 2.92B / 19 deals (both up MoM).
1.2.1 Overseas financings
Prins AI — $100M Series B (4 Oct) led by AAB VC. AI digital-identity / digital-human provider (PRINS AI training product) for enterprises, brands, celebrities, and individuals; scenes: broadcast media, brand marketing, e-comm live/short video, edu/entertainment, AR/VR/AI. Prior: $22M A+ (Aug); $10M A (Base 10, Kleiner Perkins).
Intella — $3.4M Pre-A from Saudi investors led by HALA Ventures and Saudi Aramco’s Wa’ed. Egyptian Arabic dialect AI — quantitative/qualitative research, generative services, speech transcription (intella Voice / Chat / Research). Voice system tested on 30,000 hours Arabic audio; ASR accuracy 95.73% — claimed above Google and IBM Watson in that niche.
Class Companion — $4M seed (8 Oct) led by Index Ventures; OpenAI Startup Fund; angels incl. Gokul Rajaram, Terrence Rohan (Otherwise Fund), Andrej Karpathy. SF AI platform giving teachers instant personalized student feedback; funds for teacher UX and hiring.
Humata AI — $3.5M with Gradient Ventures (Google), ARK Invest, M13. “ChatGPT for all your files (incl. PDF)” — upload, ask, learn from experience. CEO Cyrus Khajvandi: grow the team.
Move AI — $10M seed (4 Oct) from Play Ventures, Warner Music Group, RKKVC, Level2 Ventures, Animoca Brands. AI/CV motion-capture for XR; single-camera “Move One” in invite-only beta, public later in 2023.
Riffusion — $4M seed (17 Oct) led by Greycroft; South Park Commons, Sky9. Text/lyrics → music; pick genre and mood. Began as free open-source by Seth Forsgren & Hayk Martiros; free app for “riffs.” The Chainsmokers advising.
Moonhub AI — $10M seed (11 Oct) from Khosla Ventures & GV; Time Ventures, Day One Ventures; angels Susan Wojcicki, Mike Volpi. AI recruiting; >$1M revenue in first year; product + team.
TitanML (London) — $2.8M seed led by Octopus Ventures. Founders James Dborin, Fergus Finn, Meryem Arik — faster/cheaper/easier LLM deploy for ML teams; real-time Falcon on commodity CPUs; partners Intel & AWS; claims 90% compute-cost cut and 20× latency improvement hours after deploy.
Pixocial — Series A for Meitu (01357) wholly owned PIXOCIAL (12 Oct); lead Eight Roads (Fidelity); FutureX A7 / ICT + company follow. AI digital content design productivity — image/video apps for China and overseas.
COPRESENCE AG — >$6M seed (investors undisclosed). Realistic 3D avatars from a single smartphone.
Luzia (Madrid) — $10M Series A led by Khosla; Pau Gasol (Gasol16), A* Capital, Abstract, FJ Labs, Globo Ventures. Free AI assistant via WhatsApp/Telegram to ~17M users; founders Álvaro Martínez Higes, Javier Andrés, Carlos Pérez. Hire, new markets, features, UX.
Wiz AI — $30M A+ from Wavemaker, Yunqi, Hillhouse, SingTel Innov8, Insignia, K3, Yunqi. Singapore humanlike voice AI customer service — multilingual large-scale personalized outbound/inbound.
AutoGPT — $12M at AI Engineer Summit 2023 led by Redpoint. Experimental open-source GPT-4 autonomous agent chaining; expand team.
Credal.ai — $4.8M seed (TechCrunch 26 Oct) led by Spark Capital; YC-backed. Connect internal enterprise data to text-gen cloud AI models safely.
1.2.2 Domestic financings
Aiforia / 爱霏粒 — multi-hundred-thousand RMB seed (26 Sep) led by Kunshan Tengwei. Cognitive-intelligence digital-twin products; “hippocampus” long-term memory for agents; first commercial line “MoLi silhouette recognition.”
OpenCSG (开放传神) — multi-tens-of-millions RMB angel early Oct; Lenovo Capital & Beijing Guoxin Zhongshu co-lead; Yuanhe FA. MDaaS (Model and Development as a Service); valuation already multi-RMB-100M.
Baichuan Intelligence — $300M A1 strategic (17 Oct); Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi + top funds. With $50M angel, cumulative $350M. Wang Xiaochuan’s firm aiming China OpenAI-class base model + apps (search, multimodal, edu, healthcare).
Weixiang Shikong (维享时空) — multi-million RMB strategic (26 Oct) from VeriSilicon, Leimu Tech; BlueRun and Youshan follow. Urban metaverse commercialization spun from WAYZ; spatial computing + spatial AIGC; Tracking / panoramic LiDAR capture; XR terminals get spatial sense and positioning.
Manfu Tech (曼孚科技) — multi-tens-of-millions RMB Series B (9 Oct) Anpu Capital. AI infra & data intelligence since 2019 commercial; AutoLabeling, AutoML, labeling/collection/cleaning; funds for AI infra, LLM labeling loop, market expand.
Zhipu AI — industrial/commercial change (23 Oct): Ant Group subsidiary Shanghai Yunya takes 2% of Zhipu Huazhang for RMB 342.3k subscribed capital. GLM-130B bilingual; ChatGLM; Bigmodel.ai (CodeGeeX, CogView).
Sinade (赛那德) — multi-tens-of-millions RMB Series B, Puhua Capital sole; Duowei FA. Process robots + vision algorithm platform for industrial logistics (DWS, singulation, unordered pick).
Nine Chapter Cloud / 九章云极 — RMB 300M D1; CEC Smart Fund, Huamin, Taiping Innovation, Dongfang Jiafu, Zhuoyuan, etc. AI foundation software into industry/regional/enterprise/alliance clouds — “AI cloud among a thousand clouds.”
WorkMagic — multi-million USD angel led by Sinovation Ventures; 42Chapter exclusive FA + follow. GenAI multi-agent marketing SaaS for Shopify SMB merchants; WorkMagic Copilot 1.0 (creative gen + marketing automation); team from TikTok, Facebook, Amazon, Waymo.
02 · Industry briefing
2.1 Global
NVIDIA Eureka: AI agent using GPT-4 to generate reward strategies — robots beat humans on complex tasks (pen spinning, drawers/cabinets, throw-and-catch). Zero-shot gen, code writing, in-context improvement for RL reward optimization; open research for robot engineers.
Frontier Model Forum + $10M AI Safety Fund: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic appoint Chris Meserole (think-tank exec) first Executive Director; $10M AI Safety Fund for tools to test/evaluate most capable models. Forum (Jul) missions: safety research; best practices; share with policymakers/academia/civil society; apps for societal challenges. Fund backs independent researchers worldwide; focus new evaluation techniques for dangerous capabilities; RFP in coming months; advisory board planned.
Amazon AI ad-image tool for sellers: product subject + text prompts → lifestyle promo images; claimed +40% CTR. No special skills; limited pilot then expand. Also AI product-description writer from keywords/sentences. SVP Colleen Aubrey: reduce creative friction.
U.S. restricts NVIDIA AI chips to China: 24 Oct notice — stop unlicensed high-end AI chip shipments; beyond A800/H800 and banned A100/H100, also L40S (Aug genAI GPU). Hits China LLM training compute; may affect partners (Colorful, Gigabyte, Ingram Micro, etc.). Domestic compute equities rallied; local cloud AI accelerator makers growing; impact to unfold.
OpenAI high-accuracy AI image recognition: developing detector aiming 99% precision against fake-news images — after text detector’s ~26% accuracy led to July takedown. Accelerated amid DALL·E 3 / Midjourney gains. Tension between gen and detect; watermarking (e.g. Google SynthID) as possible path.
2.2 Domestic
Fudan DISC-FinLLM: FudanDISC financial LLM — LoRA SFT of Baichuan-13B-Chat on DISC-Fin-SFT (~250k samples: consult, task, compute, retrieval-augmented). Strong on financial NLP, human questions, data analysis, current-affairs; params open-sourced with tech report. Multi-expert fine-tune so modules don’t interfere; LoRA via DDP.
Tencent Hunyuan upgrade (26 Oct): Chinese capability claimed past GPT-3.5; code ability +20% to leading tier; text-to-image officially opened. Besides 100B+ main model, first vertical 7B/13B via API; training scale >2.5T tokens; multilingual high-compression tokenizer. LLM-SFT: dynamic zigzag attention, progressive CoT, Ghost Attention, complex-instruction auto-evolution — Chinese-instruction eval past GPT-3.5; HumanEval ahead of other open code models after 32-language code/books/blogs. T2I with original algos for semantics, reasonableness, quality — used in assets, product synth, game art; high ad excellence/adoption. Backed by Angel ML platform (AngelPTM / AngelHCF).
NetEase Cloud Commerce “Shanghe” LLM: at Wuzhen AIGC industry conference — vertical model for intelligent customer service (logic, emotion, extract, disambiguation, multilingual; knowledge-base build, ticket flow, session insight). Named from Dao De Jing ethos of steady accumulation; aims “flywheel” closed-loop service.
03 · AIGC track deep-dives (digest pointers)
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott — AI Copilots as knowledge-work industrial revolution: AI as platform not product; Copilots keep developers in flow; OpenAI as Microsoft’s most important AI partner. (Full Unique Research rewrite also in this batch: 20231030a07jmt00.)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — AI self-supervision to improve AI: GPT-2/3 emergent abilities; scaling laws (data/compute/algorithms); physicists in AI; Constitutional AI; safety checkpoints; long context / knowledge ops. (Full rewrite: 20231031a07mcv00.)
Figma founder Dylan Field — AI won’t replace human designers: AI may draft or suggest; designers still iterate finals; FigJam bridges design↔code for brainstorming with custom prompts. (Separate inventory piece later.)
Roblox CEO David Baszucki — AI changes games and virtual worlds: multimodal generative models; text/image → content without advanced 3D skill; personalized experiences; NPCs as copilots; VR/spatial computing (Meta Quest). (Separate inventory piece later.)
04 · Report statement
4.1 Team
Unique Research is Unique Capital’s center for new-business innovation research — domestic and go-global enterprise-service ecosystems (new marketing, new retail, new experience) plus data/AI/automation applied to consumer retail, local services, healthcare, etc. Analysts from top research consultancies, PE funds, and tech media.
4.2 Data notes
Liability: Limited methods and sources; market reference only; Unique Research assumes no legal liability for data or views.
Definitions: Primary-market stats from Xenniu Data. Seed merged with angel where scale/count is small. Lead-investor cumulative size ≈ 50% of round; non-leads ≈ equal share of round. Percentage totals forced to 100% (last item = residual; ~1% rounding tolerance).
FX: Pre-2023 amounts at 31 Dec 2022 spot; 2023 monthly amounts at deal-day rates.
15 CN images (charts/tables); attach on ingest. Full editorial rewrite of ~10,221 CJK monthly — secondary movers, all named overseas/domestic rounds, global/domestic news, and deep-dive pointers preserved.
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