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PixVerse Closes $439 Million Series C Extension as Valuation Tops $2 Billion With Alibaba Joining

AI video startup PixVerse's Series C extension brings the round to $439 million and pushes its valuation above $2 billion, as it pivots from video clips toward real-time interactive worlds.

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PixVerse startups funding Series C AI video generation Alibaba
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Overview

PixVerse, a Singapore-based AI video generation platform, has closed a Series C extension that brings its total Series C fundraising to $439 million, according to PixVerse’s own announcement. The new tranche pushes the company’s valuation above $2 billion, according to TechCrunch, a figure independently corroborated by MLQ.ai and TheSaaSNews. Alibaba joined the extension round as a new investor alongside seven other backers, as the company shifts its focus from generating standalone video clips toward building real-time, interactive AI worlds.

What We Know

  • The Series C extension brings total Series C fundraising to $439 million, according to PixVerse and confirmed by TechCrunch, TechNode Global, DealStreetAsia, and TheSaaSNews.
  • With the new tranche, PixVerse’s valuation has crossed over $2 billion, according to TechCrunch. PixVerse itself did not disclose a specific valuation figure or the size of the extension tranche, according to DealStreetAsia.
  • PixVerse closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. The company did not disclose the amount, though TechCrunch reported that Bloomberg put it in the range of $300 million.
  • New investors in the extension include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, with returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures also participating, according to TechNode Global and TheSaaSNews.
  • PixVerse was founded in April 2023 by Wang Changhu, a former Microsoft Research Asia and ByteDance executive, according to DealStreetAsia, together with co-founder Jaden Xie. Wang serves as Co-Founder and CEO and Xie as Co-Founder and President, according to TechNode Global.
  • The platform has grown to more than 150 million registered users across more than 177 countries, according to PixVerse. TechCrunch additionally reports over 15 million monthly active users.
  • PixVerse launched R1, which it calls the world’s first real-time world model, in January 2026, according to TechNode Global. Three months later, the company updated R1 with shared worlds and personalized avatars, letting multiple users enter and shape the same AI-generated world in real time, per the same report.
  • With the new funding, PixVerse is launching the PixVerse Game Engine, which applies R1 to game creation, letting players interact in natural language while the world responds visually and mechanically in real time, according to TechNode Global.
  • The company also plans to launch a new V-Series model for video generation and release a new version of its world model this year, and aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies, according to TechCrunch.
  • Co-Founder and President Jaden Xie said: “From the start, we set out to make professional video creation accessible to everyone. That same belief now drives everything we are building toward interactive worlds,” according to PixVerse.
  • Co-Founder and CEO Changhu Wang said: “Generative models have always had the potential to power experiences beyond what we are used to. What we are building now is the architecture to realize that. We are building a system where the world a player inhabits is not pre-rendered but continuously generated, in real time, in response to what they do. That is a fundamentally different foundation for what a game can be,” according to PixVerse.
  • Discussing competitors, Xie told TechCrunch: “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.” OpenAI’s shutdown of its Sora video app was previously reported by The Machine Herald.
  • On what differentiates PixVerse technically, Xie told TechCrunch: “We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video-generation platform.” Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, and Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital, according to TechCrunch.

What We Don’t Know

  • PixVerse has not disclosed the exact size of the extension tranche itself, only the cumulative $439 million Series C total, according to DealStreetAsia.
  • The company has not published an official valuation figure; the above-$2-billion mark comes from independent reporting rather than a company disclosure.
  • No timeline has been given for the release of the new V-Series model or the next world model version beyond “this year,” according to TechCrunch.

Analysis

The round lands in a crowded field. MLQ.ai reports that OpenAI’s Sora, Runway, Luma AI, Kling, and MiniMax all compete for creator and enterprise adoption in AI video generation, a segment the outlet says has attracted billions of dollars in aggregate venture funding over the past 18 months. PixVerse’s pivot toward the PixVerse Game Engine and real-time interactive worlds represents a bet that the next phase of competition will be fought less over clip quality and more over building persistent, responsive environments — an area where Xie argues few rivals currently have the technical grounding to compete at all.