Kuaishou-backed chip startup Lingchuan raises $150M Series B
What's the deal? Lingchuan Technology, a Kuaishou-affiliated AI chip company, has raised US$137.5M (roughly $150 million) in a Series B round. The round was jointly led by Yizhuang State Investment Yitang Shenghe Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, and Zhaohui CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with more than a dozen other investors participating.
What does it do? Spun out of Kuaishou Group's heterogeneous computing and chip division in March 2024, Lingchuan designs chips for video-focused AI workloads. Its SL200 chip is already deployed across internet companies including Kuaishou, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Bilibili, covering 99.7% of Kuaishou's live-streaming-related businesses.
The product: Lingchuan says its next-generation 3D-stacked chips have been taped out and will ship at scale next year. The company is betting on AI-generated video (AIGV) as the key workload where general-purpose GPUs hit efficiency limits.
What's the money for? The round will fund research and mass production of the next-generation chips, plus global market expansion.
Why it stands out: The raise sits in the top 5% of Series B semiconductor rounds in China over the past four years, by amount — ranking in roughly the 96th percentile across 210 comparable deals.
What could go wrong? The scale-shipment plan remains a forward-looking claim. A tape-out does not prove manufacturing yield, customer uptake, or competitive performance — peers Nano-core and Sunmmio have both pushed mass-production targets to 2027. Lingchuan's existing SL200 deployments give it a firmer commercial footing than the new chip's tape-out alone.
The signal: China's 3D-stacked and near-memory AI-chip segment is drawing heavy capital, with Nano-core raising more than US$137.5M and Sunmmio nearly US$275M over the past year. Lingchuan's round, backed by both internet demand and state-linked funds, shows investors are concentrating bets on domestic chips tuned for the video workloads where China claims a lead.
Read more: eu.36kr.com
Image credit: Sangitiana
