Lingchuan Technology (凌川科技), a Beijing designer of chips for AI video, completed a RMB 1bn (about $140m) Series B round, according to 36Kr on 4 November 2026. Yitang Shenghe Fund, which is run by Beijing E-Town State-owned Investment, Qiming Venture Partners and Zhaohui Capital co-led the round, and Qiming's own announcement confirmed the three as co-leads.
The company said the money will go to research and mass production of next-generation chips and to expanding in global markets. No valuation was disclosed.
Where the company came from
Lingchuan was set up by the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Fund and Kuaishou Group. It grew out of Kuaishou's heterogeneous computing and chip division and became an independent company in March 2024, 36Kr reported. Shunxi Fund was its first institutional investor.
Its team has an average of more than 15 years of experience and comes from companies including Huawei, Intel and NVIDIA. According to 36Kr, it has led more than ten tape-outs and mass productions of AI and video chips.
What it sells
Lingchuan's current product is the SL200 intelligent video chip, with nearly 100,000 units sold. It is used at Kuaishou, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud and Bilibili, and handles about 99.7% of Kuaishou's live-streaming transcoding, 36Kr reported. The company also offers Nebula, a platform for AI-generated video, and LUCAS, its own software stack.
The next chip is built on a design called DiPU, a RISC-V architecture based on dataflow and spatial computing that aims for deterministic latency, timing and bandwidth. It uses a 3D near-memory design with multi-chip modules and hybrid bonding, and 36Kr said local memory access latency is under 2 nanoseconds. The chip taped out in April, has recently come back from the foundry, and is expected to ship in volume next year.
Who invested
Beyond the co-leads, new investors included Guotai Haitong Kaiyuan, Huakong Investment, CSI Yangtze River Delta Tech Fund, Hong Kong Science Park's venture fund and others. Strategic investors included Shixi Capital and Loongson Ventures. Existing shareholders Shunxi Fund, Shuimu Investment Group and Jiuzhi Capital added to their holdings.
Zheng Hao of Yitang Shenghe Fund said the fund valued the company's rare ability to deploy at scale and its independent architecture. Zhou Zhifeng, managing partner at Qiming, said the company entered with an architecture built around deterministic latency and ties to the RISC-V ecosystem, aimed at the inefficiency and cost of general-purpose GPUs for multimodal models.
Founder, chairman and chief executive Liu Lingzhi said he expects the market for AI video computing to grow to hundreds of billions of yuan within three to five years and possibly beyond one trillion. Chief operating officer Zhang Wenjing said the focus is engineering delivery and lowering costs for commercial use. The sources do not give a headcount or revenue.
The investors named in the Chinese-language report also included Huakong Investment, Beigong Investment, CCB Investment (Beijing) and Mingshi Capital.