companies

StepFun

Shanghai frontier lab building trillion-parameter Step models, distributed to consumers through its Yuewen assistant app.

StepFun, formally Shanghai Jieyue Xingchen Intelligent Technology, was founded in Shanghai in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft Research Asia executive and longtime search and NLP researcher. It's counted among China's so-called 'AI Tiger' startups alongside Zhipu, Moonshot and MiniMax, and has focused its research on multimodal scale: Step-1V handles vision and text together, while Step-2 is a multi-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that ranked fifth on the LiveBench leaderboard in late 2024, trailing only frontier releases from OpenAI and Google. The company raised more than $718 million in a Series B+ round in January 2026, a record for a single China large-model financing over the prior year, with backers including Tencent, Qiming Venture Partners, and several state-linked investment funds. By May 2026 it was reportedly closing in on a near-$2.5 billion round and had unwound its offshore VIE structure to prepare for a Hong Kong listing. Consumer-facing, its models reach the public through Yuewen, a chat assistant that competes directly with ByteDance's Doubao and Moonshot's Kimi for everyday Chinese users.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Shanghai, China

Sector

lab