17 billion! Largest financing for a large Chinese model, changing ownership in just one day

According to sources, Step Star will complete theNearly $2.5 billion (about Rs. 17 billion)financingThe company has dismantled its red-chip structure and accelerated preparations for its IPO in Hong Kong, and may become another domestic big model company to be listed in Hong Kong in addition to Wisdom Spectrum and MiniMax.

Upon completion of the financing, this round will surpass the Dark Side of the Moon's $2 billion (roughly Rs. 13.6 billion) financing announced just yesterday, making it the newly mintedLargest Financing in China's Large Modeling Circle.

It is reported that in this round of financing, the industry chain capital concentrated in the entrance. In addition to financial investors, Huaqin, Longcheer, Howell, ZTE and many other cell phone and consumer electronics industry chain companies to participate in it, covering a number of links from the whole machine manufacturing to the upstream core devices.

In addition, Temasek, the “Hong Kong version of Temasek”, is also known as the "Hong Kong".Hong Kong Investment Management Company Limited (HKIC)It also appears in the list of shareholders of Step Star. As an investment platform established by the HKSAR Government, HKIC currentlyBetting on only one company in the big modeling space, Step Leap. Its stake in the company will provide further endorsement for Step Leap's listing in Hong Kong.

According to the information of Enterprise Search, Step Star has previously completed two rounds of financing. In January this year, Step Star completed the B+ round of financing, the amount of financingOver 5 billion dollarsIn December 2024, the company closedseveral billion dollarsSeries B financing, with investors including Wogen Capital, Qiming Venture Capital, Tencent and Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co.

▲Step Star Financing (Source: Enterprise Search)

Step Star 2023 was founded in Shanghai byDr. Daxin Jiang, Former Global Vice President, MicrosoftFounded and served as CEO of what is known in the industry as the “Big Model Six Tigers”One of the. In January of this year, Step Star announced that Kuangyi Technology co-founder and Chairman of Qianli TechnologyIndy officially becomes chairman of the board, is responsible for the overall strategic rhythm and technology direction. He forms the core management team with CEO Jiang Daxin, Chief Scientist Zhang Xiangyu, and CTO Zhu Yibo.

▲Daxin Jiang, CEO of StepStar (left) and Yin Qi, Chairman of StepStar (right) (Source: StepStar)

Currently, Step Star has released the Step series of generalized big model matrices to the public, with capabilities covering language, multimodality, and inference, and has open-sourced several multimodal big models for developers. In February of this year, the company released open source base modelsStep 3.5 Flash ModelingIn April, an optimized version of Step 3.5 Flash 2603 was released, a family of models that approximates the capabilities of closed-source models in Agent scenarios and mathematical tasks, and is capable of handling complex, long-chain tasks.

As for the progress of the listing, the industrial and commercial information shows that Step Star has beenCompletion of the share reform in April, changed from a limited liability company to a joint stock limited company. Its red-chip structure has also been dismantled, which is often seen as a key pre-step to an IPO in Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said.

Since the beginning of this year, domestic big model financing and IPO actions have heated up significantly. Recently, the dark side of the moon (Kimi) completed a new round of financing of about 2 billion U.S. dollars, and the post-investment valuation exceeded 20 billion U.S. dollars (about 136 billion yuan); DeepSeek has also been exposed to contact external financing.

In addition, on January 7 of this year, the Beijing Large Model Enterpriseknowledge baseOfficially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming a Hong Kong stock“The First Unit of Large Models.”Its IPO fundraising totaled more than HK$4.3 billion (about RMB 3.737 billion) and its latest market capitalization is HK$417.755 billion (about RMB 363.029 billion).

Following suit, on January 9, Shanghai Big Model EnterprisesMiniMaxOfficially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising a total of about 5.54 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 4.814 billion yuan), the latest market value of 238.990 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 207.682 billion yuan). StepStar may become a domestic3rdLarge model companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.