17 matching
On October 14 Modal raised $750M at a $15.75B valuation, 3.4 times its level five months earlier and both times under 16x annualized revenue; on October 12 Infinigence AI announced a RMB 2.3B Series C, and on October 15 China Telecom led Qingcheng.AI's round. Our view: in the compute middle layer between chips and models, the US prices on revenue while China prices on making domestic chips usable. SiliconFlow, the only one with disclosed revenue, is valued at about 140x its 2025 full-year revenue, and the money comes from carriers, cloud companies, chipmakers and local state funds.
On October 8, Manus, whose sale to Meta was blocked by Beijing, closed a round of more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, at about $4 billion according to Bloomberg. Benchmark, its largest US shareholder, sat out the August buyback, and Tencent took its stake. Our view: AI companies whose technology originated in China can no longer buy a US exit by moving to Singapore; their shareholders and exit route have moved back to Chinese capital and Hong Kong. The price is no lower than for US peers: the new round is about 10 times annualized revenue, on par with US-born Genspark, though only half of the roughly 20 times Meta paid.
