Smart Spectrum AI secures new round of funding at a pre-investment valuation of $20 billion

Big model unicorn company with a new round of funding officially landed.

Less than a month before the official announcement of 2.5 billion yuan of cumulative financing within the year in October 2023, Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Science and Technology Co.Smart Spectrum AI, hereinafter referred to as: Smart Spectrum), was revealed to be in the process of raising a new round of financing at a valuation of 20 billion dollars.

Since the beginning of this year, Wisdom Spectrum has been exposed several times to receive a new round of financing, yet its valuation is always unknown.

Today, the dust has only settled with Zhongguancun Science City Corporation announcing through its public number that it has led a new round of financing for Wisdom Spectrum at a pre-investment valuation of 20 billion yuan.

Wisdom Spectrum officials did not comment on the post-investment valuation or further information about the financing.

And this is the second year in a row that Smart Spectrum, has been revealed to have closed 3 rounds of funding during the year. So far last year, the company has completed 6 rounds of funding.

It is worth mentioning that Smart Spectrum has successively won the bets of many Internet giants such as Ali, Tencent, Meituan and Xiaomi, as well as the investments of well-known organizations such as Sequoia, Gao Tile, Junlian and Shunwei, in theAI macromodelThe company is a standout amongst companies.

Six rounds of financing in two years, valuation first to exceed $20 billion

Since its establishment, Smart Spectrum has been a hot presence in the market. As early as August 2019, only 2 months after its establishment, China Control Fund, China Science and Technology Innovation Star and others have been on fire. 2021-2021, the company, on the other hand, has obtained A and B rounds of financing in September.

Among them, Wisdom Spectrum's over one hundred million yuan of Series A financing was jointly invested by Brilliance Caixin, China Control Fund, General Gate Venture Capital, Turing Venture Capital, Beijing Dafan, Tongzhi Investment, Zaozhuang Tongzhi, Rongpin Investment, Caizhi Venture Capital, Lingyunguang, etc.; and hundreds of millions of yuan of Series B financing was jointly led by Junlian Capital and Qiming Venture Capital.

Entering 2023, under the big model boom, Wisdom Spectrum has been exposed to three rounds of financing within a year, but has never disclosed the details. Until October 20, the company officially announced that this year has accumulated more than 2.5 billion yuan of financing, and the investors are star-studded.

Smart Spectrum said that the participants mainly include the Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund (Junlian Capital is the fund manager), Meituan, Ant, Ali, Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Shunwei, Boss Direct, Good Future, Sequoia, Gao Tiles and other institutions and some of the old shareholders, including Junlian Capital, to follow the investment.

It should be noted that previously, Ali and Tencent, due to competition in many businesses, the two in foreign investment, almost maintaining a "king without a king" state. Wisdom spectrum, is Ali and Tencent, following the drip in 2015, 2018, after the small red book, once again realize the "double king" gathered.

So far this year, there has been a dizzying amount of funding news for Smart Spectrum.

Earlier this year, Wisdom Spectrum officially confirmed that it had gained a stake in the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, which is the first AI big model company invested in by the fund since its establishment.

In June, according to the Financial Times, Prosperity7, a fund managed by the venture capital arm of Middle Eastern oil giant Saudi Aramco, invested in Wisdom Spectrum, totaling $400 million ($2.8 billion) in the current round and boosting the latter's valuation to $3 billion (about $21.3 billion). At the time, Prosperity7 and Smart Spectrum did not respond to requests for comment in response to the news.

Until today, Zhongguancun Science City Corporation led a new round of financing for Wisdom Spectrum, the party once again at the official level to get accurate news. The official announcement, but also clearly gave the company's latest valuation: pre-investment 20 billion yuan.

20 billion valuation, the market is generally considered to be the "100 mode war" in this stand out, into the first echelon of the baseline.

In the past three months, in addition to the wisdom spectrum, Baichuan Intelligence completed a 5 billion yuan A2 round of financing in July, with a post-investment valuation of 20 billion yuan; according to Bloomberg news, in August this year, the dark side of the moon completed a new round of financing of more than 300 million U.S. dollars, with a post-investment valuation of 3.3 billion U.S. dollars (about 23.4 billion yuan).

This also means that the top three base big model unicorns in China have joined the "20 billion" club in three months. Wisdom spectrum is the first AI large model enterprise with a valuation of more than 20 billion yuan.

Complete benchmarking of OpenAI, open platform customers have exceeded 500,000

Wisdom Spectrum was established from the technical achievements of Tsinghua University, and the founding team has been working in the KEG Lab of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University. CEO Peng Zhang graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, and President Shao-Lan Wang is a doctor of Tsinghua Innovation Leader.

Wisdom Spectrum is committed to building a new generation of cognitive intelligence big model, linking billions of users in the physical world through the big model, bringing continuous innovation and change to thousands of industries, and accelerating towards the era of general artificial intelligence.

At the end of 2020, Smart Spectrum developed the GLM pre-training architecture, trained and completed the tens of billions of parameter model GLM-10B in 2021, successfully trained a converged trillions of sparse model using the MoE architecture in the same year, and developed and open-sourced the Chinese/English bilingual hundreds of billions of mega-scale pre-training model GLM-130B in 2022.

伴随ChatGPT引爆全球，智谱于2023年推出千亿基座对话模型ChatGLM并两次升级，开源版本的ChatGLM-6B更是让大模型开发者的本地微调和部署成为可能，在开源社区受到广泛欢迎。

Up to now, the Wisdom Spectrum open source model series has accumulated more than 20 million downloads globally, and has been selected as the most popular AI organization on the Hugging Face platform.

Entering 2024, Wisdom Spectrum is even more action-packed. In January this year, Wiseplan launched a new generation of base large model GLM-4, the overall performance compared to the previous generation has been significantly improved, compared to the international advanced level.In June, Wiseplan released the GLM-4-9B open source model, and for the first time open source the visual model GLM-4V-9B based on GLM, with multimodal capabilities comparable to GPT-4V.In July, Wiseplan's AI-generated video function Qingying was online on Wiseplan QingYing, and soon open-sourced CogVideoX, the video generation model behind it.

In recent times, the news of Smart Spectrum has been even more constant with the release of technological breakthroughs and commercialization progress.

A week ago, Wiseparation just released an upgraded version of GLM-4-Plus, and GPT-4o-like video call function and Sora-like video generation function will be launched in Wiseparation's C-suite product "Wiseparation Qingyin" one after another within a month. At the same time, Wisdom Spectrum's "Big Model Family Bucket" has also iterated to the next stop of multimodal, releasing Plus versions that can support video and webpage comprehension, including GLM-4V-Plus, a visual model that can understand videos, and CogView-3-Plus, a text-to-digital model that can support image editing, and so on.

Up to now, based on the powerful ability of the large model of the full self-research base, Wiseplan has built a complete set of model products that benchmark OpenAI, including the AI efficiency assistant Wiseplan Clear Speech, the high-efficiency code model CodeGeeX, the multimodal comprehension model CogVLM, and the Vincennes diagram model CogView, and so on.

In addition to the continuous iteration on technology, Wisdom Spectrum is also considered to be the company with the deepest accumulation on commercialization among this wave of big model startups. Currently, there are several main models for commercialization of Wiseplan, on the B-side: API, cloud privatization, and local privatization.

It is worth mentioning that Wisdom Spectrum put forward the Model as a Service (MaaS) market concept a long time ago, and Wisdom Spectrum's big model open platform, bigmodel.cn, provides out-of-the-box AI application development resources and enterprise-level modeling solutions, empowering enterprises and developers to build smarter AI products in an all-round way.

According to Smart Spectrum's public announcement at Open Day in June, bigmodel.cn already has over 500,000 customers.

From Plan Z to Fund Z, Smart Spectrum Accelerates Eco-Investments

Smart Spectrum CEO Peng Zhang previously said, "We want to build a big model ecosystem, in which we work hand in hand with our partners to make the ecosystem bigger and bigger, which is our longer-term commercialization goal."

So, like BAT and other giants, the "war chest" of Smart Spectrum is gradually taking shape.

2023 big model boom, in addition to listening to the heart of intelligence, such as the face of the wall intelligence, power law intelligence, no questions core dome, etc., highly sought after by VC AI star startups, have left the wisdom of the spectrum of the investment figure.

According to statistics, in the whole year of 2023, Wisdom Spectrum made a total of 8 foreign investments, and the quality and quantity of its large model industry investment cases cannot be ignored in the industry.

Along with the increase of foreign investment, the light and ambitious Smart Spectrum, in October 2023, officially launched the Z Plan, which aims to support big model entrepreneurs and form a big model ecological circle of friends through capital + resources.

In January this year, Wisdom Spectrum further upgraded the Z Plan by launching a total of 1 billion yuan of large model startup fund with ecological partners to support the original innovation of large models, covering the direction of large model algorithms, underlying arithmetic, chip optimization, industry large models and super applications.

On August 4, during the Smart Spectrum Z Plan Enterprise Roadshow Day, Zhang Peng officially announced that Smart Spectrum has launched the AGI Eco-Fund: Z Fund with its eco-partners to support more early stage projects with potential in the big model track.

Just on September 3, humanoid robot maker Dynamic Easy Technology completed an angel round of financing of tens of millions of yuan, led by Fengrui Capital and Z Fund (Smart Spectrum Eco Fund).

This also becomes the first outbound investment of Z Fund since its official debut.

To date, Wiseplan has invested externally in 11 companies, including BioDigital Technology, BioGeometry, and Silicon Flow, which has already exceeded the number of investments made in the entire year of 2023.

It is important to note that the Zhongguancun Science City Corporation today announced that it is leading the investment in Wisdom Spectrum, and mentioned that this round of financing "is used to support the technological innovation and ecological development of Wisdom Spectrum's large model of domestic base.

In the future, the flourishing "big model ecology" of Smart Spectrum will only become more spectacular.