In a segment where many startups were once expected to be flattened by rivals with deeper pockets once interest gathered, AIsphere is now trying to tell a different story. The company behind the video generation platform PixVerse said it has reached unicorn status after closing a Series C funding round, the company announced on March 13.
The round was led by CDH Investments, with participation from Antler, EnvisionX Capital, iGlobe Partners, Lion X Ventures, UOB Venture Management, and 3W Fund, alongside other investors. The amount raised and the company’s latest valuation were not disclosed.
The claim lands with more weight than a typical funding announcement because PixVerse had already been framed as a business with a sturdier commercial base than much of the hype surrounding generative artificial intelligence. When 36Kr covered the company’s Series B round in September 2025, founder and CEO Wang Changhu said subscription revenue from PixVerse’s products was already covering most of its costs. In that context, the new unicorn framing suggests that PixVerse’s position stems not only from investor appetite for AI, but also from revenue-backed growth.
PixVerse reported more than 100 million users across 175 countries as of last September. The new funding will be used to accelerate the company’s global expansion from a newly established office in Singapore. PixVerse joins a growing group of Chinese-founded companies that have used the city-state as an international base, including ByteDance, Shein, and Mihoyo, which operates globally as Hoyoverse. The Singapore office will support enterprise operations, sales, partnerships, and global market development, with a particular focus on North America and Asia.
That expansion reflects a broader shift in how PixVerse is positioning itself. The company is no longer presenting the product solely as a consumer-focused video app built around trends. Instead, it is attempting to build a case across several fronts following the latest fundraise, including consumer scale, enterprise adoption, and technical development.
In its announcement, PixVerse linked the Series C round to the January 2026 launch of R1, which it described as the first “real-time video generation model,” as well as the continued rollout of its V5.6 model. According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks as of March 13, V5.6 ranked fifth globally in text-to-video generation and fourth in image-to-video generation.
Wang’s description of the company’s ambition offers a clearer view of the product strategy than the funding language. PixVerse, he said, is “reconstructing how people interact with content.” The statement reflects the company’s long-held view that AI-driven video generation is not only about reducing the cost of existing production workflows, but also about enabling new forms of content that can be generated, modified, and experienced with far less friction than traditional methods.
More broadly, the AI video generation market is beginning to sort itself into more durable categories. For a while, discussions centered on whether startups could survive once large tech companies entered the field. Now, the more important question is which companies can translate model quality into products people return to, businesses pay for, and creators build routines around.
PixVerse is one of several Chinese companies attempting to make that case, alongside products such as Kuaishou’s Kling AI, MiniMax’s Hailuo AI, and Shengshu’s Vidu.