Video Generation Startup PixVerse Raises $439M, Valuation Soars Past $2B

Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse announced Tuesday that it has closed a Series C extension round, raising a total of $439 million. The company told TechCrunch that with the new funding, its valuation has crossed the $2 billion mark. The capital will be used to expand its world model offerings and reach customers across geographies.

PixVerse closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While the company did not disclose the amount, Bloomberg reported it to be around $300 million. Investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, along with returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s LionX Ventures.

The company was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, while Xie served as an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.

PixVerse offers multiple models: a V-Series video model for consumer and API use, a C-Series video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development and world building, released earlier this year. Through its tool, users can generate videos in up to 4K resolution with baked-in audio.

The startup’s consumer product has over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to specify how many are paying users, but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute for image-to-video generation.

Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity, only a few companies are making progress in the video generation market. “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 told TechCrunch.

He noted equal opportunity in consumer and enterprise markets, as users create videos for fun and consume AI-generated short-form content, while enterprises use video generation for creative, learning, and marketing purposes. Xie emphasized that the startup’s core strength lies in labeling. “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. This experience comes in handy when building a video generation platform,” he said.

PixVerse has ambitious plans for this year. It aims to expand enterprise outreach globally and already has a deal with investor Alibaba to deploy video generation features. On the product front, it plans to launch a new V-Series model and release a new version of its world model. The company has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. With the new funding, it plans to hire more researchers and go-to-market staff.

Despite its confidence, the video market is heating up. Competitors include ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth, Kling AI from Asia, and Western players like Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. Multiple companies, including startups by Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li, are building world models.