Unique Research · Company / Weekly digest · July 29, 2024
China funding
SiliconFlow (硅基流动) — AI infra (ex-OneFlow founder Yuan Jinhui); ~¥100M angel+ with Huawei Hubble, Zhipu-related Beijing Zhipu Huazhang, 360’s Beijing Qihu. SiliconLLM / OneDiff inference + SiliconCloud. Prior ¥50M angel (Jan 2024). Founded Aug 2023.
Wen Xiaobai (问小白) under Yuanshi Tech — multimodal QA; $32M seed (Matrix, Redpoint, Kuaishou co-founder Su Hua). Voice; first-token latency avg <2.3s; MoE self-built models since H1 2023.
Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能) — ¥5B Series A; Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi + top VCs; Beijing/Shanghai AI industry funds, Shenzhen Capital Group, etc. Next: Series B at ¥20B valuation. 12 models shipped; AI assistant “Baixiaoying” (May); medical focus — Baichuan 3 beats GPT-4 on multiple medical evals; L0–L5 AI-medicine ladder.
Xianglu Tech (橡鹿科技) — AI cooking robots; ~¥200M strategic from JD + full partnership; expand factories (second base north of Yangtze); next-gen robot targeted 2025.
Whale Robot (鲸鱼机器人) — AI Robot+Edu; >¥100M 7th round (Shanghai Sports Industry Fund et al.); ages 3–22 product lines; 30+ countries; >500k units/year.
Overseas funding
Thoughtful AI — healthcare RCM agents (CAM/EVA/PHIL); $20M Series A led by Drive Capital (Nick Solaro), TriplePoint. Claims, eligibility, payment tracking.
Cohere — $500M Series D (Jul 22) led by PSP Investments; Cisco, Fujitsu, AMD Ventures, EDC; valuation $5.5B; ARR ~$35M; headcount to ~2× this year.
Harvey — legal AI; $100M Series C led by GV; OpenAI, KP, Sequoia, Elad Gil, SV Angel; valuation $1.5B; ARR ×3 in ~6 months; team ×2.
Gumloop — no-code AI automation; $3.1M seed led by First Round; YC W24 + angel founders.
Lakera — $20M Series A led by Atomico; Citi Ventures, Dropbox; Lakera Guard API firewall vs. prompt injection.
Reworkd — web scraping/extraction; $2.75M seed (Paul Graham, AI Grant, SV Angel); +$1.25M pre-seed = $4M total.
Products & events
Baidu Cloud “Zhijin” — LLM stack for finance innovation.
WPS AI “AI伴写” — companion writing.
AiShi / PixVerse V2 — video-gen upgrade.
Korea forms AI Autonomous Manufacturing Alliance.
Nvidia preparing flagship AI chip tailored for China market; Samsung HBM3 for China market passes Nvidia quality tests.
Meta Llama 3.1 405B — largest recent open LM.
OpenAI SearchGPT beta with publisher partnerships for authoritative answers.
ElevenLabs Turbo V2.5 TTS.
People
Xing Jun (ex-miHoYo Inverse Entropy research lead) — Shanghai Bantu Tech, AI virtual-human games.
Mark Zuckerberg — wants Meta as “the Linux of AI.”