Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure developer Infinigence AI has raised almost 500 million yuan ($70.2 million) in a Series A round of financing to bring its total fundraising to nearly 1 billion yuan ($140.5 million) just 16 months after its inception.
China-based Infinigence AI, which grew out of the Electronics Engineering Department at Tsinghua University, closed its Series A round with the support of over 30 new and existing investors.
Qiming Venture Partners, Hongtai Aplus, and a 5-billion-yuan ($702 million) fund backed by China’s National Council for Social Security Fund and managed by Legend Capital, jointly led the transaction.
Other investors include Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group, Xiaomi Corp, and its founder Lei Jun-backed venture capital (VC) firm Shunwei Capital. The 10-billion-yuan ($1.4 billion) Shanghai AI Investment Fund, a subsidiary of China Development Bank Capital Corp, and financial investors Fortune Capital and Detong Capital participated in the deal.
Existing investors, such as internet search giant Baidu and Zhipu AI, one of China’s fastest-rising generative AI unicorns, re-upped in the Series A round along with renowned VCs like HongShan, Monolith Management, ZhenFund, Matrix Partners China, and Northern Light Venture Capital.
The proceeds will fund Infinigence AI in talent acquisition and tech R&D, as well as the commercialisation of its products to help the startup become “the preferred computing power operator” in the era of large language models (LLMs), said the startup in a Monday post on its WeChat account.
Infinigence AI was founded in May 2023 with the help of Tsinghua University Prof. Wang Yu, who mentored the startup’s chief scientist Dai Guohao and counts its CEO Xia Lixue as his first doctoral student. Its chief technology officer (CTO) Yan Shengen, who graduated with a doctorate from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, previously worked at Baidu Research and Hong Kong-listed AI company SenseTime Group.
Prof. Wang, whose research focuses on areas like parallel circuit analysis and application-specific hardware computing, played a crucial role when his students Yao Song and Shan Yi created the machine learning company DeePhi Technology in 2016. DeePhi was sold to US chipmaker Xilinx in July 2018 for an undisclosed sum.
