On May 20, it was reported in the market that the dark side of the big model company was carrying out the latest round of financing with a valuation of $3 billion. The new investors included Tencent and Gaorong Venture Capital. This means that after investing in MiniMax, Zhipu AI and Baichuan Intelligent, Tencent once again pulled a large model unicorn company into its own camp.
Ali’s annotation to the big model is even more active and fierce. Since August last year, Ali has successively invested in Zhipu AI, 10,000 objects and Baichuan Intelligent. This year, he has invested heavily in the new round of financing of the Dark Side of the Moon and MiniMax, bringing together all the five big model unicorns in China.
For this latest round of financing, 21st century business herald reporter asked the dark side of the moon for verification, and the other party said it would not comment.
It is understood that before this, the dark side of the moon received early investments from institutions such as Sequoia China, Today Capital, Zhenge Fund and Lisi Capital in 2023.
In February of this year, the dark side of the moon received $1 billion in new financing, setting a new record for the largest single financing in the domestic AI field. After this round of financing, the valuation of the dark side of the moon has reached about $2.5 billion. Among them, $800 million comes from new shareholders and $200 million comes from old shareholders. New shareholders participating in financing include Internet companies such as Ali and Xiaohongshu, while old shareholders such as Sequoia China and Lisi Capital continue to follow suit.
It is also worth noting that in addition to continuous recognition at the capital level, Kimi, a product of the dark side of the moon, has also won high growth at the market level. According to the latest data of AI product list (aicpb.com), in April 2024, the number of visitors to the web version of Kimi Smart Assistant, a product of Dark Side of Moon, reached 20.04 million, surpassing ERNIE Bot and ranking first among similar products in China.
Kimi products have surpassed ERNIE Bot in April.
The Dark Side of the Moon was founded in 2023. In October of that year, the company launched Kimi AI, the world’s first intelligent assistant product supporting the input of 200,000 Chinese characters. The real explosion of this product was in March this year, and it also led the Dark Side of the Moon into the public’s field of vision.
On March 18th, the Dark Side of the Moon announced in WeChat official account that Kimi Intelligent Assistant had made another breakthrough in the technology of long context window, and the lossless context length was increased from 200,000 words to 2 million words. Since 9:30 am on March 20, Kimi’s system traffic has continued to increase abnormally, far exceeding the company’s previous expected plan.
Someone close to the dark side of the moon told 21st century business herald that Kimi’s users have really grown rapidly. Basically, the team just celebrated that the number of users of the product reached an order of magnitude, and soon the number of users reached another order of magnitude.
In terms of user data, the data of AI product list (aicpb.com) shows that the number of visitors to KimiChat reached 3.05 million in February, up by 107.6% from last month, ranking third in the domestic AI product visit list, second only to Baidu ERNIE Bot and ali tong Yiqianwen.
At present, the latest data of AI product list (aicpb.com) shows that in April 2024, the number of visitors to the web version of Kimi intelligent assistant reached 20.04 million, up 60.2% from last month, and the number of visitors has surpassed that of ERNIE Bot, ranking first among similar products in China. In addition, according to QuestMobile’s data, in March 2024, the monthly active users of Kimi Smart Assistant APP were 5.897 million, and the monthly active users of Kimi Smart Assistant WeChat applet had exceeded 911,000.
"Kimi’s explosion has attracted many users to start using products, which has brought about a rapid increase in visits, which may also be one of the reasons for attracting new investors. But what is the user retention after the freshness? This is the focus of everyone’s attention at this stage, and it also tests the product technical strength of the dark side of the moon. " An investor said to 21st century business herald.
In addition to the dark side of the moon, MiniMax, Baichuan Intelligent and Zhipu AI also reported new financing progress this year. In April, there was market news that the current valuation of MiniMax had exceeded $2.5 billion.
In addition, some media reported that Baichuan Intelligent will carry out a new round of financing with hundreds of millions of dollars, which will become one of the largest financing in the AI field in China in 2024. Investors from the participating companies confirmed that Baichuan Intelligent has been valued at over US$ 1.8 billion (about RMB 13 billion) this year. In response, Baichuan Intelligent responded that the latest financing information has not been officially disclosed, and the amount involved in the report is not accurate.
Zhipu AI has always been the darling of the capital market. In 2023, it completed 2.5 billion yuan of financing, and the participating investment institutions included the social security fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund, Meituan, Ant, Ali, Tencent, Xiaomi, Sequoia and Gaoyou.
At the beginning of this year, Zhipu AI received investment from Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. Wang Shaolan, president of Zhipu AI, said in an exclusive interview with 21st century business herald at the end of April that financing is a continuous process for large model companies. The company must have a new financing plan this year, but the details are not convenient to disclose for the time being.
Technology giants compete for big model unicorns.
In the era of mobile Internet, once a startup company accepts an investment from both Tencent and Ali, it will be regarded as a "queue". Looking at the investment maps of hundreds of companies in Ali and Tencent, there are only a handful of startups that can invest in both.
In the last wave, the two giants, Tencent and Ali, made simultaneous bets on UGC. They jointly invested in Xiaohongshu, bilibili, Zhihu, bilibili and Zhihu, and the valuation of Xiaohongshu was as high as $20 billion in the last round of financing in 2021.
Nowadays, in the AI ? ? big model track, the actions of the two giants are more similar. On the one hand, the big model burns money crazily and I don’t know when it will be profitable. On the other hand, it has already launched its own big model. Why did Tencent and Ali struggle to pull the big model unicorn into their own camp?
One of the main driving forces is the rapid development of AI big model, which makes the computing demand of cloud providers surge, and also brings huge new business growth space for computing manufacturers. According to the latest data of Synergy Research Group, in Q4 2023, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the three major cloud computing service providers, accounted for 66% of the global market share. According to the data released by market research organization Canalys, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud continued to dominate the cloud service market in China.
It can be seen that the most active giants in big model investment are the top cloud computing providers in domestic and foreign markets. A16Z, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, estimates that about 20%-40% of the revenue of large model application layer vendors will be used for reasoning and model fine-tuning, which is usually paid directly to cloud vendors or third-party model providers. Third-party model providers also spend about half of their revenue on cloud infrastructure, so 10%-20% of the total revenue of generative AI eventually flows to cloud providers.
An investor analyzed to the reporter, "For the technology giants, by investing in a large-scale model enterprise to their own cloud, they can bring real growth to the business at the moment. At this stage, instead of going to the big model where you can’t see when you can make a profit, it is better to become the infrastructure of the big model first. "