(Yicai) June 10 -- SiliconFlow, an artificial intelligence infrastructure startup, has raised hundreds of millions of Chinese yuan, equivalent to tens of millions of US dollars, in its latest funding round led by Alibaba Cloud.

Existing shareholder Sinovation Ventures also hiked its stake in the Series A financing round, by putting in more capital than originally expected, the Beijing-based firm said yesterday. The funds will mainly go towards talent recruitment, product development as well as global expansion.

"Our business has grown explosively since the beginning of this year with the rise of open-source large models, including Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek, as well as soaring demand for AI inference power," said Yuan Jinhui, founder of SiliconFlow. "With this new funding, we will increase R&D investment and expand our footprint globally with the aim of soon becoming the go-to platform for generative AI developers."

SiliconFlow saw a major traffic spike earlier this year when it became the first cloud application programming interface provider in China for DeepSeek R-1. In just 10 days, website traffic surged 30-fold, breaking past the one-million-visits mark, and temporarily surpassing Hangzhou-based Alibaba Cloud’s traffic volume.

The company held a pre-A round of over CNY100 million (USD13.9 million) at the end of last year, just before SiliconFlow’s business took off thanks to the rise of DeepSeek. This was led by China Growth Capital and Puhua Capital as well as Glory Ventures, another existing shareholder which put in extra funds.

SiliconFlow has closed four rounds of funding in the past 18 months since it secured CNY50 million (USD7 million) in angel funding in January 2023. On-demand services giant Meituan is also an investor.

Founded in 2023, SiliconFlow focuses on AI infrastructure and aims to tackle the high cost of developing large AI models. The firm’s self-developed high-performance inference engine significantly improves chip efficiency, especially through the deep optimization of domestic chips.

Editor: Kim Taylor