ShengShu Technology, the Beijing company behind the Vidu AI video generator, announced on 10 April 2026 that it had raised nearly ¥2bn (about $293m) in a Series B round led by Alibaba Cloud.
China Internet Investment Fund, a national strategic investment fund, Jiuan Haitang, TAL Education Group and Luminous Ventures joined as strategic investors. Existing shareholders LINK-X Capital, Delta Capital, C&D Emerging Investment, BV Baidu Ventures and Zhuoyuan Asia increased their holdings, according to the company's announcement, which the Zhongguancun Dongsheng Science Park republished.
The company did not disclose a valuation. 36Kr reported that the round valued ShengShu at ¥12bn (about $1.76bn).
“We aim to use a unified model architecture to connect the full chain from perception to action, so that world models can truly bridge the digital and physical worlds.”Zhu Jun, Founder, ShengShu Technology
What ShengShu does
ShengShu was founded in 2023, and its core team comes from Tsinghua University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Yicai reported. Its founder, Zhu Jun, is a Tsinghua professor whose research group forms the company's technical core, according to 36Kr.
Its main product, Vidu, generates video and sound together. The latest version, Vidu Q3, makes clips of up to 16 seconds with synchronised audio, multiple shots, camera movement control, music, sound effects and dialogue in several languages. ShengShu said Vidu Q3 ranked first on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard after its release. Vidu is sold through an open developer platform and through the Vidu Agent and Vidu Claw apps, and is also available on Alibaba Cloud's Bailian platform.
In December 2025 the company open-sourced Motus, a model built on its video-generation architecture that is designed to control robots. ShengShu said it was working with several companies that build robots and embodied AI. According to 36Kr, Vidu's users and revenue each grew more than tenfold in 2025, though the company has not published absolute figures.
What the money is for
ShengShu said it would use the funding to develop a general world model, a system meant to understand and predict how the real world behaves. It plans a shared foundation model with two branches: a world generation model for digital content and a world action model for physical tasks such as industrial production, commercial services and home use. The company also said it was hiring talent globally.
Zhu said the company aimed to use one model architecture to connect the whole chain from perception to action, so that world models could link the digital and physical worlds, Yicai reported. Cai Wei, a partner at Luminous Ventures, said general world models were becoming the next main route towards artificial general intelligence after large language models.
The funding so far
The Series B came about two months after a Series A+ round of more than ¥600m (about $87m) in February 2026, which 36Kr reported valued the company at ¥8bn. Together the two rounds brought in about ¥2.6bn this year.
36Kr counted seven rounds in about three years. They include three angel rounds starting around June 2023, when Ant Group invested close to ¥100m, and a Pre-A round in June 2024. The angel valuation was ¥700m, according to 36Kr. BV Baidu Ventures has invested since the first round, its managing partner Gao Xue said.
Company website: shengshu.com