AI Market Watch Asia · Fortnight 15: Kling AI raises $3 billion in a record multimodal AI funding round

Kling AI raises $3 billion in a record multimodal AI funding round

The spinout’s $3 billion round is presented as the largest single funding round for a multimodal AI company globally and establishes a major capital threshold for video-generation competitors.

Kling AI raised $3 billion in a record multimodal funding round, the largest single-round investment in a multimodal AI company globally, and set a $15 billion pre-money valuation that establishes a new capital threshold for video-generation competitors.

The round was led by CPE Yuanfeng, Guofang Venture Capital, BlueFive, Tencent, CITIC Securities, and Zhongguancun Science City Fund, with strategic participation from Alibaba, Baidu, Huace Film and TV, and Mango Industrial Capital, according to the Sina Finance report. Kuaishou retains a 68.33% stake and 53.8% voting control in the spinout, which targets a Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO in early 2027 with an investor put option at 8% annualized return if not listed by 2031.

Prior coverage noted the round could reach $3 billion at an $18 billion post-money valuation, with TechNode reporting that Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu were all co-investors in a single video-gen startup, a structural hedge against building wholly in-house foundation models, per TechNode’s report.

Kling AI’s $5 billion annualized revenue run rate as of March 2026, and its target of $20 billion by December 2027, positions it as the number-two player in video generation globally, trailing Seedance which holds over 80% market share by daily token consumption, per the same Sina Finance report. The pre-money valuation fell from an earlier $20 billion target to $15 billion, reflecting what the article calls a “rational-accounting” shift away from narrative pricing.

Notable Developments

• ModelBest — Raised more than $700 million at a reported $2.8 billion valuation for its on-device foundation-model business. The round follows broad strategic backing and highlights continued large-scale financing for Chinese edge-AI developers.
• MiniMax — Completed a HK$16 billion, or roughly $2.04 billion, funding round. The financing places the foundation-model developer among China’s most heavily capitalized AI labs.
• Manus — Tencent is reportedly leading a Chinese consortium to buy Meta’s stake in the AI-agent startup at about a $2 billion valuation after Beijing blocked Meta’s acquisition. The transaction would retain Manus within a Chinese investor group while Tencent remains a minority shareholder.
• Yunbao Intelligent — Filed for a ChiNext IPO in Shenzhen as a Tencent-backed DPU developer. It reported RMB 3.7 billion in 2025 revenue, up more than 900% year on year, while remaining deeply loss-making.
• SiliconFlow — Filed for a Hong Kong IPO under the Chapter 18C special-technology rules at a reported $1.07 billion valuation. Revenue rose 653% in 2025, but heavy compute procurement and free-token incentives drove gross margin negative.
• Upstage — Commercialized a domestic Korean AI stack with FuriosaAI and AXZ, combining an NPU, Solar LLM, and Daum search summaries. The partners report more than 50% lower inference cost than NVIDIA H200 GPUs and 500 million daily tokens at Daum.
• Studio Kiko — Raised a pre-Series A after its Neardoc ambient clinical scribe was adopted by more than 300 hospitals and clinics within two months. The company reports under 2% clinician editing, 70% less charting time, and 1.5x patient throughput.
• Rebellions — Became the first unlisted company to receive a direct equity investment from Korea’s National Growth Fund. The move makes the AI-chip developer a focal point of Korea’s state-backed semiconductor strategy.
• Barosa — Launched a Taobao shopping agent that converts Korean colloquial queries into optimized Chinese searches. In beta, it reported 25% higher search success and a 22% improvement in purchase conversion.
• OpenSquilla — Released an agentic-routing system that ensembles four Chinese models and reported leading DRACO benchmark results. It claimed performance above or near frontier Western models at materially lower per-task cost, a result that warrants independent validation.

By Country

🇰🇷 Korea

• Fulcrum Technologies — Fulcrum Technologies closed a seed bridge from Smilegate Investment for its e-commerce AI agent Hookable, which has signed up over 13,000 businesses with 98% paid subscription retention.
• 벙커키즈 — Bunker Kids raised ₩2 billion (~$1.5 million) seed funding from Crit Ventures for its AI character chat platform WHIF, which reached profitability within nine months with 28% international revenue share.
• FuriosaAI — FuriosaAI, Nuvacore, and D-Matrix each raised new funding rounds as venture capital interest in AI inference chips surged, targeting alternatives to Nvidia's GPU dominance.
• Connectorian — Connectorian secured pre-seed funding from Bluepoint Partners to build decision infrastructure that structures unstructured data before AI inference, following a proof-of-concept with a major Korean financial institution.
• Connectionary — Connectionary raised an undisclosed pre-seed round from Bluepoint Partners to build AI decision infrastructure via its Atomic Intelligence Decomposition method, targeting finance, semiconductors, and aerospace clients.
• Algorix — Algorix secured pre-seed funding from Kakao Ventures to build a unified data layer that consolidates structured and unstructured enterprise data for AI agents, partnering with AWS on go-to-market.
• Wee Aid — Wee Aid secured undisclosed pre-Series A funding from New Paradigm Investment for Bo-um, its dental sLLM claims-automation platform that onboarded over 215 clinics within five months using an EMR-free architecture.
• SAIM — SAIM received investment from accelerator CNT Tech for its industrial safety AI SaaS, including the GS Grade 1-certified Safe Buddy assistant used by Hyundai Engineering & Construction and DL E&C.

🇨🇳 China

• Zhichuangxin — Zhichuangxin, a RISC-V chip startup founded by a former Alibaba executive, raised an undisclosed pre-A round to develop AI inference and edge-computing processors as an alternative to x86 and Arm.
• 帷幄 — Whale (帷幄) closed a $40 million Series C3 round in China, pushing its cumulative Series C funding past $100 million for AI-powered retail marketing analytics.
• DeepSeek — DeepSeek is negotiating a $1.5 billion raise at a $71 billion valuation, up from $50 billion a month earlier, and targets an IPO as early as late 2027.
• 趋境科技 — Qujing Technology closed over RMB 1 billion (~$138 million) in Series A funding led by Henan Investment Group Huirong Fund within six months, positioning itself as a token-production supplier for China's AI infrastructure.
• Zeroth — Zeroth, a humanoid robotics startup, raised $73.58 million led by Ant Group, marking Ant's 12th investment in China's embodied AI sector.
• DeepSeek — DeepSeek cut V4-Pro inference pricing by 75%, intensifying the enterprise AI price war and pressuring rivals, including Western foundation-model labs, to defend margins.
• Zhipu — Chinese AI lab Zhipu AI is pursuing a $4 billion share sale, one of the largest fundraises in the domestic AI sector, signaling intensified capital competition among Chinese foundation model players.
• 德睿智药 — Chinese AI drug discovery firm MindRank AI raises $52M Series B to upgrade its MAP engine, advance oral GLP-1RA MDR-001 to Phase III, and expand pipeline.

🇯🇵 Japan

• Datawise — Datawise raised undisclosed funding from PKSHA Algorithm Fund for its Area Marketer platform, which combines GPS data with AI to analyze foot traffic for retail and local government clients.
• ZeamiCyberSecurity — ZeamiCyberSecurity closed a ¥50 million (~$330,000) pre-Series A round led by eStart for its browser-native Zeami Intelligence platform, covering internal and external attack surface management.
• exmore — Exmore secured seed funding led by Oikaze Ventures for SuguDesk, a 24/7 AI chat reception tool for clinics that lifted booking conversion about 2.5x for AdeB Clinic.
• NanoFrontier — NanoFrontier, a Japanese AI startup, is selected for Japan's 2026 Regional Revitalization Practical Development Subsidy, gaining non-dilutive government funding for regional AI deployment.
• Turing — Japanese autonomous driving startup Turing closes $79M Series A with AMD providing chip supply support for edge AI inference.
• Neusignal Therapeutics — Japanese AI-driven drug developer Neusignal Therapeutics raises $34.5M Series B to advance Alzheimer's candidate NTX-083 into US Phase 1b trials.
• Spike Studios — Tokyo-based Spike Studio raises ¥370M (~$2.6M) seed round to develop AI agents that codify experienced workers' tacit knowledge into automated workflows across multiple industries.
• NVIDIA — NVIDIA launches a revenue-sharing AI infrastructure model that provides startups GPU compute access in exchange for a portion of cloud revenue, shifting from hardware sales to usage-based monetization

🇮🇳 India

• E3 Electric.Ai — E3 Electric.Ai secured Rs 100 crore (~$12 million) in Series A funding led by BluVenture to build AI-powered electric scooters and expand across India.
• Netrasemi — Netrasemi launches production-ready A2000 edge AI chip on TSMC 12nm; backed by Zoho and India's DLI scheme, targeting surveillance and automotive edge inference.
• Aukera — Aukera raises $10M in debt-led funding led by Alteria Capital less than a year after $15M equity round, expanding to 35 stores as Titan enters lab-grown diamond segment.
• Sarvam AI — HCLTech is leading a $300M round in Sarvam AI at a $1.5B valuation, marking a strategic bet by an Indian IT giant to acquire sovereign AI capabilities and hedge against generative AI disruption of its
• Edubuk — Edubuk secures $50M strategic investment from Nimbus Capital for its AI and blockchain-powered credential verification and job-matching platforms, targeting the global fake CV crisis.
• Adage Automation — Adage Automation raises $28M from InCred Growth Partners for AI industrial software and digital monitoring platform expansion.
• thumpN — thumpN raises $3.75M pre-seed from Paytm founder and celebrity artists to build AI-native live event discovery platform with conversational assistant 'Shadow'.
• Mowito — Mowito raises $3M pre-seed to teach industrial robots via human demonstration, targeting manufacturing automation's programming bottleneck.

Southeast Asia

• Whale (SG) — Whale secured an additional $40 million Series C3 extension led by CMB International and SMBC Asia Rising Fund, bringing its total Series C to $100 million for North America and Europe expansion.
• PixVerse (SG) — PixVerse closed a $439 million Series C extension at a valuation above $2 billion, with Alibaba among investors, expanding its video-generation and world-model offerings to 150 million registered users.
• Manus (SG) — Beijing forces Meta to unwind its $2B Manus acquisition; Tencent-led consortium buys back the agentic AI startup, establishing 'origin over domicile' as a permanent regulatory principle for Chinese-or
• K25 AI (SG) — Singapore-based K25 AI raised $2M from a Nasdaq-listed firm to scale enterprise workflow automation products, signaling growing investor interest in practical, ROI-driven AI.
• dConstruct Robotics (SG) — Singapore-based dConstruct Robotics raises funding for AI-driven spatial navigation tech targeting industrial and logistics robots in GPS-denied settings.
• ACRouter (SG) — ACRouter, an open-source AI router, selects the optimal coding model per task using execution feedback, cutting inference costs 2.6x versus defaulting to an Opus-class model.
• CDNetworks (SG) — CDNetworks launches a global edge acceleration and security solution for multi-model AI platforms, reducing latency by 70% in early deployments.

Compiled from 41 linked sources across AI Market Watch's Asia news index. Fortnight covers 2026-07-03 – 2026-07-17.