companies

StepFun

Laboratorio d’avanguardia di Shanghai che sviluppa modelli Step da mille miliardi di parametri, distribuiti ai consumatori tramite la sua app dell’assistente Yuewen.

In inglese

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