BEIJING — HiDream.ai, a three-year-old Beijing generative AI company, has closed a RMB 1.5 billion (about $222 million) Series C financing round, the company announced on July 27, pushing its valuation past unicorn status and adding another mega-round to China's fast-heating generative AI sector.
The round was co-led by the National Social Security Fund Sichuan Revitalization Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, ICBC Capital, Hongyi Asset Management and Dunhong Capital. Ten new investors joined, including Xiamen ITG Capital, Bank of Communications Capital, Hubei Yangtze River Industry Investment Group, and two entertainment-industry funds, Shanghai Film New Vision Fund and Huace Film & TV. Six existing shareholders, among them Hefei Industrial Investment and Fortune Capital, also re-upped; Hefei Industrial Investment has now backed HiDream.ai across three consecutive rounds.
The Series C caps a run of dealmaking: combined with two earlier rounds closed over the prior three months, HiDream.ai has now raised more than RMB 2.1 billion — north of $290 million — since roughly late April, according to the company.
"Forward-looking judgment on AI technology and continued innovation in large-model architecture have always been core to HiDream.ai's growth," said Mei Tao, founder and CEO of HiDream.ai, in a statement announcing the round. "We believe the evolution from multimodal AI to native omni-modal world models is an essential path toward AGI. With this funding, we will continue building the foundation for native omni-modal world models and work with global developers and partners to expand the boundaries of intelligence."
HiDream.ai, founded in 2023, has built its business around the HiDream model family, most notably the HiDream-O1 series, a native omni-modal system built on what the company calls a Unified Transformer, or UiT, architecture. Earlier this year the open-source version of HiDream-O1 ranked first globally on the text-to-image leaderboard maintained by Artificial Analysis, an independent AI benchmarking platform, while its closed-source counterpart placed among the global top three. At WAIC 2026, HiDream.ai also introduced vivago R1, a multimodal creative agent built for long-form video generation and editing that the company says applies long-horizon reasoning — planning and executing multi-step creative workflows rather than generating single, isolated assets.
Commercially, the company organizes its products around what it calls a "1+1+3" framework: one foundation model, one Token Hub platform for standardized model access, and three application areas — commercial marketing, film and entertainment production, and content creation. HiDream.ai says its tools now reach more than 50 million professional users and over 40,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries and regions. The new round's entertainment-industry backers, including Shanghai Film New Vision Fund and Huace Film & TV, extend existing partnerships with Shanghai Film Co. and Hubei Yangtze River Film Group on AI-assisted production, cross-screen marketing and full-chain IP development, the company said.
Why It Matters
HiDream.ai's raise is a data point in a much larger story: China's AI funding machine is running hotter than at any point in years, and increasingly it is state and quasi-state capital doing the running. Crunchbase data shows Chinese startups pulled in roughly $30 billion in venture funding in the second quarter of 2026 alone, up 424 percent from a year earlier, with AI companies capturing the bulk of it — led by DeepSeek's $7.4 billion raise and multi-hundred-million-dollar rounds for StepFun and others.
"The state recognizes they can't really match what Nvidia or the rest of the world's AI giants are doing," Kaidi Gao, a senior VC analyst at PitchBook, told Fortune earlier this year. "But there is a different game that they can play. They can deploy capital into what are the most readily addressable sectors," she said, pointing to semiconductors, compute infrastructure and hardware. That same logic runs through HiDream.ai's cap table: a national social security fund, a state-owned bank's investment arm, and a string of provincial and municipal government-linked platforms from Sichuan, Hefei, Xiamen and Hubei sit alongside conventional venture and industry money.
The round also lands squarely inside a widening standoff over cross-border AI capital. Washington barred U.S. investors from funding Chinese AI and chip companies starting in January 2025; Beijing has since moved to mirror that restriction, reportedly instructing Moonshot AI, StepFun and ByteDance not to accept U.S. capital without government clearance. With foreign money increasingly locked out on both sides, rounds like HiDream.ai's Series C show how domestic state and provincial capital has stepped in to keep China's generative AI champions funded — and how differently that model runs from Silicon Valley's private-capital-driven approach.
What to Watch
Whether HiDream.ai follows fellow Chinese AI names such as MiniMax, Zhipu AI and chip designer Biren toward a Hong Kong listing will be an early test of investor appetite beyond the mainland. Also worth tracking: how vivago R1 and HiDream.ai's agent products perform against rivals such as Kuaishou's Kling and Zhipu in the crowded video-generation market, whether the fresh entertainment-industry capital from Huace Film & TV and Shanghai Film New Vision Fund translates into visible content deals, and whether Beijing's tightening rules on foreign investment in strategic AI firms eventually extend to companies like HiDream.ai that already serve customers in more than 100 countries.
"The state recognizes they can't really match what Nvidia or the rest of the world's AI giants are doing. But there is a different game that they can play. They can deploy capital into what are the most readily addressable sectors."- Kaidi Gao, Senior VC Analyst, PitchBook