Singapore-based AI video startup PixVerse has closed a Series C extension, bringing its total raise for the round to $439 million. According to TechCrunch, the new funding pushes the company’s valuation past $2 billion. PixVerse plans to use the capital to grow its world model business and expand into new markets globally.
The round attracted a notable list of new backers, including Alibaba, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, and CloudAlpha. They join returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures. The initial Series C closed in March, led by CDH Investments, and was reported by Bloomberg to be around $300 million.
The company was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, building the visual understanding technology that powers TikTok’s recommendation system. Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital. That ByteDance connection is more than a footnote. It shapes how PixVerse thinks about its competitive edge.
The AI video market is crowded and getting more so. ByteDance has its Seedance model. Kling AI is a serious Asian competitor. In the West, Runway, Midjourney, and Luma are all pushing hard. World model development is attracting big names too, with startups backed by Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li both working in the space. Against that backdrop, a $2 billion valuation is a signal that investors believe PixVerse has something real to offer.
So what is that something? Xie is direct about it: labeling, not data volume.
“We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video-generation platform,” Xie told TechCrunch.
That argument matters because most players in this space make similar claims about output quality. Saying your model produces “high-quality” video is not a differentiator on its own. PixVerse is pointing to a specific technical process, rooted in real production experience, as the reason its output holds up.
The product itself covers a few distinct use cases. PixVerse currently offers three model lines:
- V-Series: a video model for consumers and API access
- C-Series: built for professional film and commercial production workflows
- R-Series: world models aimed at game development and world building, released earlier this year
Users can generate videos at up to 4K resolution with audio included. The consumer product has 150 million registered users and 15 million monthly active users. The company did not say how many are paying, but its image-to-video rate is $4.80 per minute of generation, which is competitive by current market standards.
Xie also made a pointed observation about the competitive field. “OpenAI exited the business when they shut down Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent are not able to create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he said. That framing, whether fully accurate or not, reflects how PixVerse is positioning itself as one of a small group of credible players.
On the market opportunity, Xie sees both consumer and enterprise sides as genuinely open. Consumers are generating videos for fun and watching short AI-made content. Enterprises are using video generation for marketing, training materials, and creative production. PixVerse already has a commercial deal with Alibaba, one of its new investors, to deploy video-generation features directly.
The company’s near-term roadmap includes a new V-Series model for video generation and an updated world model, both planned for this year. PixVerse has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. With the new funding, it intends to hire more researchers and expand its go-to-market team as it pushes into enterprise accounts globally.
