China generative AI start-up Luchen gets Series A funding

Neither the actual size of the round nor the participating investors were disclosed. The company raised USD 6m across seed and angel rounds from Sinovation Ventures, BlueRun Venture, and Zhenfund in September last year.

Luchen claims this is its third funding round since its inception 18 months ago. The new capital will be used for recruitment and business expansion, according to a statement posted by Sinovation Venture on its WeChat account.

Yang You, Luchen's founder, was involved in research into distributed computing as part of his doctorate studies at University of California Berkley. He helped set a world record for the training of image database ImageNet and large language model (LLM) Bert.

Continuing this focus on LLMs based on natural language processing (NLP), Luchen aims to reduce the cost of training through parallel or distributed networks and the fine-tuning of large neural networks. Its first product, Colossal-AI, operates on-premises and in the cloud.

Following the release of ChatGPT, which is based on an LLM developed by Microsoft-supported Open AI and is capable of engaging in human-like conversation, generative artificial intelligence has become a popular investment theme globally. Numerous AI-generated content (AIGC) start-ups have received funding in China, including LangBoat and Emotibot.

AIGC opportunities tend to fall into three distinct layers: foundational LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 framework at the bottom; sector-specific models for the likes of finance and healthcare in the middle; and a top layer comprising applications that leverage the capabilities of LLMs.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• artificial intelligence
• Sinovation Ventures
• BlueRun Ventures
• ZhenFund