AI chip startup "Lingchuan Technology" recently announced the completion of a Series A+ round of financing worth hundreds of millions of yuan. The round was led by Qifu Capital, with participation from institutions and industry funds such as Baidu Venture Capital, Xin Guodu, and Jinpu Investment. The funds will be mainly used for the R&D of the next-generation chips, mass production expansion of the existing product SL200, and the expansion of overseas markets.

As a hardware-based software company focusing on the underlying computing power of multimodal large models such as intelligent video and generative video, Lingchuan Technology was established in March 2024, initiated by the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Fund and Kuaishou Group. It was formerly the heterogeneous computing and chip division of Kuaishou. Relying on Dr. Liu Lingzhi, the founder, and a core team from leading chip and internet companies, the company has successfully transformed from an in-house research team of a big internet company into a solid force for independent commercialization.

In response to the memory and bandwidth bottlenecks brought by the evolution of large models from text to video, Lingchuan Technology has deeply integrated into the RISC-V ecosystem, launching an innovative latency-deterministic DiPU architecture and a unified computing platform LUCAS. Its core SoC chip SL200 has won first place in the commercial encoder sub-category of the World Video Coding Competition for three consecutive years. Compared to NVIDIA's latest AV1 solution, it improves compression efficiency by 30%–35%, and the monthly failure rate of the ten-thousand-card cluster is less than 0.01%.