Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse today said it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that with the new tranche of financing, its valuation has surpassed $2 billion. With the cash, the company aims to expand its global model offering and reach customers across geographies.

The company closed its seed Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While he did not disclose the amount of the financing, Bloomberg reported that it was around $300 million. PixVerse said investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures.

The company was founded by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie in 2023. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance in computer vision and Xie was CEO of investment firm Lighthouse Capital.

PixVerse offers multiple models, including a Series V video model for consumer and API use, a Series C video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R Series of world models for game development and world building, which launched earlier this year.

Through its tool, users can generate videos with a resolution of up to 4k with integrated audio. The startup said its consumer product has more than 150 million registered users and more than 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to say how many of them are paying users, but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute for image-to-video generation.

Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity for video generation to succeed, only a few companies are making progress in the market.

“OpenAI went out of business when they closed Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent can’t create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he told TechCrunch.

He said there is a level playing field in the consumer and enterprise markets as users create videos for fun and also consume short video content created with artificial intelligence, while businesses use video generation for creative, learning and marketing use cases.

However, saying that the startup model produces a “high quality” result is not a single qualifier. Xie mentioned that his strength lies in labeling.

“We believe the key difference is not in the data, but in how it is labeled, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he developed a core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this technology, TikTok was able to accurately label data and build a robust recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video generation platform,” Xie said.

The company has big ambitions this year. You want to expand your business reach around the world. The startup already has an agreement with its investor Alibaba to implement video generation functions.

In terms of product launches, it plans to launch a new V Series model for video generation and launch a new version of its global model this year. It has 150 employees in offices in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. With the new funding, PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and people in commercialization roles.

Despite confidence in its own models and products, the video market is heating up. There are players like ByteDance with its Seedance model, Video Rebirth from former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu, and Asia’s Kling AI. In the West, there are competitors such as Midjourney, Runway and Luma. Several companies, including startups Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li, are building global models.