Singapore-based PixVerse closed a Series C extension that brings the total round to $439 million and pushes its valuation above $2 billion, the company said today. The extension pulled in Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha as new backers, alongside returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC's Lion X Ventures. It follows the initial tranche closed in March, led by CDH Investments at a reported $300 million.
The raise lands as the AI video-generation market thins out at the top. PixVerse says its consumer product has crossed 150 million registered users and 15 million monthly active users, with image-to-video generation priced at $4.80 per minute. The company declined to break out how many are paying, but the price point undercuts most Western competitors on a per-minute basis.
PixVerse was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu, previously a computer vision researcher at ByteDance, and Jaden Xie, formerly an executive director at Lighthouse Capital. Its product stack now spans three lines: a V-Series model for consumer and API use, a C-Series aimed at professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development, released earlier this year. Output tops out at 4K resolution with audio generated in the same pass.
Key facts
- 01PixVerse closed a Series C extension totaling $439M, pushing its valuation above $2B.
- 02Alibaba joined the round alongside Lollapalooza Capital, Mirae Asset, and returning investor iGlobe Partners.
- 03The consumer app reports 150M registered users and 15M monthly actives, priced at $4.80 per minute for image-to-video.
- 04The initial Series C, led by CDH Investments, closed in March 2026 at a reported $300M.
- 05PixVerse now employs 150 staff across Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai.
Xie argues the field has narrowed to a handful of viable players after OpenAI shut down Sora 2 and left the consumer video business.
“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.”— Jaden Xie, PixVerse co-founder
Meta and Tencent, in his framing, have not shipped models that meet the quality bar. The claim is aggressive — ByteDance's Seedance, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu's Video Rebirth, and Kling AI are all active in Asia, and Midjourney, Runway, and Luma remain the Western reference points. World-model efforts from Yann LeCun's and Fei-Fei Li's ventures add another axis of competition, which AI Chat Daily covered last week as billions flow into the category.
The company's technical pitch centers on data labeling rather than data volume.
That framing matters because compute costs and model quality are converging across the top labs, and the moat increasingly sits in training data pipelines rather than parameter counts. Whether PixVerse's TikTok-era labeling pedigree translates into a durable quality edge is the open question the $2 billion valuation is pricing.
“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.”— Jaden Xie, PixVerse co-founder
The Alibaba investment comes with a distribution deal — PixVerse's video generation will be deployed inside Alibaba products, giving the startup an enterprise on-ramp it did not have to build alone. Enterprise use cases the company is targeting include creative production, learning content, and marketing. On the consumer side, the pitch is that users are both generating short video for fun and consuming AI-made short video as a content category in its own right.
PixVerse plans to launch a new V-Series video model and a refreshed world model this year, and says it will hire more researchers and expand its go-to-market team from the current headcount of 150 staff across Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. Global enterprise outreach is the stated priority for the fresh capital.
The skeptical read is that video generation quality is still uneven across every provider, per-minute economics remain unproven at scale, and the market Xie describes as a two-horse race has at least six credible contenders depending on how you count Chinese labs. Kling in particular has shipped rapid model upgrades, and Runway's enterprise footprint in Hollywood post-production is real revenue that PixVerse still needs to match.
For the broader AI market, PixVerse's raise signals that video generation is now a category where regional champions can attract $400M-plus checks without needing a US foundation lab as anchor. Alibaba writing a check into a Singapore-headquartered competitor to ByteDance's Seedance is the more interesting subplot — the hyperscaler is hedging inside its own home market, and the video-model layer is where that hedge is landing.
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