Video generation startup PixVerse raises $439M, valuation soars past $2B

Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse said today that it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that, with the new tranche of funding, its valuation has crossed over $2 billion. With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.

The company closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While it didn’t disclose the funding amount, Bloomberg reported it to be in the range of $300 million. PixVerse said that investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s LionX Ventures.

The company was founded by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie in 2023. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, and Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.

PixVerse offers multiple models, including a V-Series video model for consumer and API use, a C-Series video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development and world building, which was released earlier this year.

Through its tool, users can generate videos in up to 4k resolution with audio baked in. The startup said that its consumer product has over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to specify how many of them are paying users but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute of generation for image-to-video.

Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity for video generation to succeed only a few companies are making progress in the market.

“OpenAI exited the business when they shut down Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent are not able to create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he told TechCrunch.

He said that there is equal opportunity in the consumer and enterprise markets as users are creating videos for fun and also consuming short video content made with AI, while enterprises are using video generation for creative, learning, and marketing use cases.

However, saying that the startup’s model produces a “high-quality” output is hardly a unique qualifier. Xie mentioned that its core strength lies in labeling.

“We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately, and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video generation platform,” Xie said.

The company has big ambitions this year. It wants to expand its enterprise outreach across the globe. The startup already has a deal with its investor Alibaba to deploy the video generation features.

In terms of product roll out, it plans to launch a new V-series model for video generation, and release a new version of its world model this year. It has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. With the new funding PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and people in go-to-market function.

Despite its confidence in its own models and products, the video market is heating up. There are players like ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth and Kling AI from Asia. In the west, there are competitors like Midjourney, Runway and Luma. Multiple companies, including Lann YeCunn and Fei Fei Li’s startups, are building world models.