Chinese AI Startup VAST Raises $200M in Follow-on Round, Reaching $1.5B Valuation

VAST, a Chinese AI model developer founded in 2023 by Simon Song, raised about $200 million in Series A+ and Series A++ financing announced on Monday. The round drew participation from more than a dozen investors including INCE Capital, Genesis Capital and Primavera Capital Group. 5 billion.

The fresh capital arrived three months after VAST closed a $50 million Series A round in March led by Alibaba and private equity firm Hengxu Capital. A VAST spokesperson declined to comment on the valuation. Song, 29, who made this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, plans to allocate the proceeds to recruitment and research and development.

Alongside the funding, VAST unveiled Project Eden, an initiative to build world models capable of generating virtual environments that multiple users can explore and interact with. Earlier this year, computer scientist Fei-Fei Li raised $1 billion for her spatial-intelligence startup World Labs to pursue similar technology.

VAST’s Tripo AI platform converts image and text prompts into detail-rich 3D objects in seconds and now produces life-like figures with cinematic quality.

Europe and Japan. Subscribers pay monthly fees ranging from $20 to $140. The company also serves enterprise clients including Chinese gaming firm NetEase and Japanese entertainment company Sony on a project basis.

Song, who majored in economics and international studies at Johns Hopkins University, returned to China in 2019 and worked first as an assistant to Xu Li, cofounder and CEO of SenseTime, before co-founding AI model developer MiniMax in 2021 and leaving in 2022 to start VAST.