AIsphere / PixVerse: $439M for Video Generation
<cite index="1-11,1-12">AIsphere announced the completion of its Series C funding round on July 14, raising a cumulative 2.98 billion yuan ($439 million), with Alibaba Group leading the extension tranche of the round.</cite> <cite index="9-1,9-2">The company had closed an initial Series C in March, anchored by CDH Investments, which Bloomberg reported to be in the range of $300 million.</cite>
<cite index="5-3">AIsphere was founded in April 2023 by Wang Changhu, a former Microsoft Research Asia and ByteDance executive, and co-founder Jaden Xie.</cite> <cite index="5-3,5-4">The company operates its flagship consumer product, PixVerse, which launched in January 2024 and has since attracted more than 150 million registered users across 177 countries.</cite>
<cite index="9-5">Investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC's Lion X Ventures.</cite> <cite index="3-4">Alibaba's involvement has deepened over successive rounds: it led a Series B exceeding $60 million in September 2025, and AIsphere subsequently signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with Alibaba Cloud for global computing power in December of that year.</cite>
<cite index="7-3">Proceeds will primarily be used to advance foundational video generation models, real-time world models, global product growth, and deployment in industrial scenarios.</cite> <cite index="2-8,2-9">The company said it would use its proprietary real-time world model, dubbed R1, to power a new game engine that lets users create and interact with artificial-intelligence-generated game worlds, and also plans to expand into interactive livestreaming, enabling AI-generated virtual characters to respond to audiences in real time.</cite>
<cite index="5-8">Combined across all rounds, PixVerse has raised well over $550 million since its founding.</cite> <cite index="5-2">The Series C close pushed AIsphere's valuation past $2 billion.</cite>
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Chai Discovery: $400M for AI-Driven Molecular Design
<cite index="16-1">Chai Discovery, the company engineering artificial intelligence models to discover new molecules, announced a $400 million Series C fundraise.</cite> <cite index="11-1">The round values the AI drug discovery company at $3.8 billion, nearly triple the $1.3 billion valuation it held seven months ago.</cite>
<cite index="11-6">The round was led by Index Ventures, alongside Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Dimension.</cite> <cite index="11-4">New backers include Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, and Baillie Gifford, alongside returning investor OpenAI.</cite>
<cite index="14-5,14-6">San Francisco-based Chai develops AI models that predict and reprogram the interactions between molecules; founded in 2024, the startup raised a $30 million seed round and launched its first AI model, Chai-1, in its first year.</cite> <cite index="14-7,14-8">The company then raised a $70 million Series A and unveiled Chai-2 in August 2025, before closing a $130 million Series B in December; this year it has struck partnership deals with Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Novartis and unveiled Chai-3.</cite>
<cite index="16-2">Chai-2 was the first zero-shot generative platform for fully de novo antibody design to achieve double-digit experimental success rates, representing a step-change over prior computational methods.</cite> <cite index="18-10,18-11">The company's platform is being used by pharma giants including Eli Lilly and Pfizer to pursue therapeutic targets that have long eluded traditional discovery methods — so-called "hard to drug" and "undruggable" targets that represent some of medicine's most pressing unmet needs.</cite>
<cite index="17-10">The raise takes Chai's total funding above $600 million in approximately eleven months.</cite>
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Broader Context
The two deals, both announced within 24 hours in mid-July 2026, together represent nearly $840 million directed at narrow AI verticals. <cite index="11-7">The global AI drug discovery market is expected to reach $2.35 billion in 2025 and grow to $13.7 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of roughly 25%.</cite> <cite index="6-3">In video generation, Grand View Research projects the global AI video generator market to grow from approximately $614 million in 2025 to more than $2.8 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of over 35%.</cite> Both rounds signal that institutional capital continues to concentrate in verticals where proprietary models can demonstrate measurable real-world traction — whether in pharmaceutical partnerships or consumer user growth — rather than spreading across generalist artificial intelligence platforms.