Shengshu Technology Bets Video Generation Leads to World Models

What the business is

Shengshu Technology (生数科技) is a Beijing-based multimodal generative AI company. Its core product is the text-to-video large model Vidu (including the Vidu Q3 series); it provides MaaS to enterprises and multimodal generative applications to consumers, and open-sourced the robot world model Motus at the end of 2025.

Starting capital：June 2023 angel round valuation: USD 100 million; cumulative public financing exceeds RMB 2.5 billion (Qiming (启明), Baidu (百度), the Beijing AI Fund (北京市AI基金), Alibaba Cloud (阿里云), etc.).

How it started

In March 2023, Zhu Jun (朱军), vice dean of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University (清华大学人工智能研究院), and Tsinghua alumni Tang Jiayu (唐家渝) and Bao Fan (鲍凡) founded Shengshu Technology (生数科技) in Beijing. The team had been researching diffusion model acceleration since 2021 (DPM-Solver was adopted by Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2), judged that large models would move from language to multimodal fusion, and persisted with the U-ViT fusion architecture from the outset. In March 2023, it open-sourced UniDiffuser, the world's first multimodal diffusion model based on U-ViT; in June, its angel round was valued at USD 100 million; subsequently, it launched two tools, PixWeaver and VoxCraft, to test the consumer side.

What happened

In April 2024, it released the text-to-video large model Vidu, raising the ceiling for domestic professional-grade video length to 16 seconds and fully benchmarking Sora; in June, it completed a Pre-A round of several hundred million yuan co-led by the Beijing Municipal Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund (北京市人工智能产业投资基金) and Baidu (百度). In 2025, users and revenue both grew more than 10 times, with services covering more than 200 countries worldwide; in September, it completed a Series A of several hundred million yuan (led by Bohua Capital (博华资本), with Baidu Strategic Investment (百度战投) and Qiming Venture Partners (启明创投) following); in December, it open-sourced the Motus model, which controls robots based on multimodal data. In January 2026, it released Vidu Q3 (16-second synchronized audio and video, 1080P, precise shot switching); in February, it completed a Series A+ round exceeding RMB 600 million (co-led by Zhongguancun Science City (中关村科学城) and Xinglian Capital (星连资本), setting a new record for the largest single financing round in China's video generation sector); in April, it completed a Series B round of nearly RMB 2 billion, led by Alibaba Cloud (阿里云), with the entire Vidu series listed on the Alibaba Cloud Bailian (百炼) model marketplace on the same day, bringing cumulative public financing to more than RMB 2.5 billion.

What can be applied

Academic first-mover advantage does not equal commercial first-mover: video generation became capital-intensive; moat must extend to applications understanding the physical world.