(Yicai) April 10 -- ShengShu Technology has secured nearly CNY2 billion (USD293 million) in its latest financing round spearheaded by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding. The Chinese artificial intelligence startup will use the proceeds to develop a universal world model that can connect the digital and physical worlds.

Participants in the Series B funding round also included the national strategic investment fund China Internet Investment Fund, online education service provider TAL Education Group, venture capital firm Luminous Ventures, as well as existing shareholders such as Baidu Venture, Beijing-based ShengShu said today.

“We aim to use a unified model architecture to connect the full chain from perception to action, building a closed-loop system that integrates understanding, generation and real-world interaction, so that world models can truly bridge the digital and physical worlds,” said founder Zhu Jun, who set up the company in 2023.

ShengShu, whose core team comes from Tsinghua University’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, focuses on building a universal intelligent system capable of accurately modeling, reasoning, predicting and acting in both the digital and physical worlds.

Built on its Foundation World Model, ShengShu has launched two AI products, namely Vidu, a video generation tool, and Motus, an action-oriented model based on its video generation architecture.

The latest version of Vidu, Vidu Q3, can generate a video of up to 16 seconds with synchronized audio and video, and supports multi-shot transitions, camera movement control and multilingual dialogue.

Motus is designed to function as an embodied intelligence brain in the real world, driving robots to move from modular task execution toward unified intelligent agents, ShengShu said. The company is already working with several leading embodied AI firms to develop robots for large-scale deployment in industrial production, commercial services and household applications.

Editor: Kim Taylor