PixVerse raises $439M as valuation passes $2B

Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse said today that it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that its valuation has crossed over $2 billion with the new tranche of funding. The extension follows PixVerse’s initial Series C round, which closed in March and was led by CDH Investments; Bloomberg reported that round to be in the range of $300 million.

Investors in the extension round include:

• Alibaba
• Lollapalooza Capital
• Ivy Capital
• Grand Mount Capital
• Eastern Bell Capital
• Mirae Asset
• BlueFocus
• CloudAlpha

They joined returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s LionX Ventures.

PixVerse was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu, a former ByteDance computer vision researcher, and Jaden Xie, a former executive director at Lighthouse Capital. The company now has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. Its consumer tool generates videos in up to 4k resolution at a rate of $4.80 per minute of generation for image-to-video, and has amassed over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users.

Xie argues that few competitors can match PixVerse’s output quality. “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 attributes PixVerse’s edge not to data availability but to how that data is labeled — a skill he says stems from Wang’s earlier work building the visual understanding technology behind TikTok at ByteDance.

With the new capital, PixVerse aims to expand its world model offering — an AI model designed to understand and predict physical interactions in a simulated environment — and reach customers across geographies, leveraging a deal with investor Alibaba to deploy its video generation features. Earlier this year, PixVerse released its R-Series of world models, and the startup plans to launch a new V-series model and release a new version of its world model this year. It will compete against Asian rivals such as Kling AI, ByteDance’s Seedance, and Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth, as well as Western players including Midjourney, Runway, and Luma, alongside separate world-model startups founded by Lann YeCunn and Fei Fei Li.

Why it matters

The $439 million raise shows investors are still committing large sums to generative video, even as the market narrows to a handful of companies able to clear the quality bar for viable world models.