December 26, 2024:
Stepfun Secures Major Series B Funding Round - Stepfun, a Chinese AI model maker, has secured hundreds of millions in Series B funding, led by Fortera Capital with major investors such as Tencent and Qiming Venture Partners. Founded in 2023 by former Microsoft researcher Jiang Daxin, Stepfun aims to compete with U.S. counterparts like OpenAI by advancing its multimodal large language models.
The company plans to enhance its models' reasoning capabilities and develop new consumer products with the new funds. This follows a recent $411 million funding round by Zhipu AI, highlighting China's growing AI innovation landscape.
