Exclusive from Hard Kr: Kuaishou-Linked AI Chip Company Lingchuan Technology Completes 1 Billion Yuan Series B Funding; 3D Chip Has Returned Wafers, Scaled Shipments Next Year

Author | Qiu Xiaofen Editor | Yuan Silai Hard Kr has learned that Lingchuan Technology, an AI chip company, recently completed a 1 billion yuan Series B funding round. The proceeds will mainly go toward next-generation chip R&D and mass production, as well as global market expansion. The round was co-led by Yizhuang State-owned Investment, Yitang Shenghe Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, and Chaohui Capital. Well-known investment institutions including Guotai Haitong Kaiyuan, Huakong Investment, China Life Yangtze River Delta Technology Innovation Fund, Beigong Investment, CCB (Beijing) Investment, Peikun Capital, Hong Kong Science Park Venture Capital Fund, Dinghui Baifu, Jinduo Investment, Xiamen Hengxing, and Mingshi Capital participated, along with industrial investors Shixi Capital, Loongson Venture Capital, and Anhui Culture and Tourism Investment. Existing shareholders Shunxi Fund, Shuimu Investment Group, and Jiuzhi Capital made follow-on investments. Lingchuan Technology was jointly initiated by the Beijing Municipal Artificial Intelligence Fund and Kuaishou Group. It was formerly the heterogeneous computing and chip division of Kuaishou Group and focuses on the underlying computing power for multimodal large models such as intelligent video and generative video. The company's founder, chairman and CEO Liu Lingzhi holds a PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. He previously served as a vice president at Kuaishou Group and held core technical management positions at Huawei and Intel. Starting in 2018, he built Kuaishou's heterogeneous computing and chip team from scratch, and is regarded as a leading figure with both academic depth and industrial experience. The team developed the SL200 intelligent video SoC chip in-house at Kuaishou, and was officially spun off as an independent company in March 2024. Since the 2017 publication of "Attention Is All You Need" and NVIDIA's launch of the first Volta V100 with Tensor Core, AI computing chips represented by general-purpose GPUs have experienced a golden decade. Starting in 2027, the industry will enter a new Makimoto's Wave cycle, in which specialized computing devices for vertical tracks such as AIGV (AI Generated Video) will face the greatest innovation opportunities and growth space. Short video is a vertical track where China holds a clear leading advantage globally, giving rise to large commercial applications such as Kuaishou, ByteDance, and Xiaohongshu, while internationally leading large models such as Kling and Seedance continue to iterate. With the explosion of applications such as short dramas, interactive videos, and AI advertising, demand for video data processing and transmission has grown sharply, placing higher requirements on the efficiency, power consumption, and cost of underlying computing power. Against this trend, AIGV is seen as the