Lingchuan Technology closed a RMB 1B Series B on November 4, giving the Beijing chip designer founded inside Kuaishou a war chest for silicon aimed squarely at AI video.
Yizhuang State Investment’s Yitang Shenghe fund, Qiming Venture Partners and Zhaohui Capital co-led. More than ten institutions joined, including Guotai Haitong Kaiyuan, CCB Trust (Beijing) Investment and CDH Baifu, alongside Loongson Venture Capital. Existing shareholders Shunxi Fund, Shuimu Investment Group and Jiuzhi Capital added capital.
From an internal division to a standalone company
Lingchuan grew out of Kuaishou’s heterogeneous computing and chip division, which founder and chief executive Liu Lingzhi built from 2018. A Shanghai Jiao Tong PhD with a University of Washington postdoc, Liu held technical roles at Huawei and Intel before becoming a Kuaishou vice president. The unit was carved out in March 2024 by the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Fund and Kuaishou.
Its first product, the SL200, squeezes live streams into multiple bitrates and resolutions. Roughly 100,000 units have shipped, Kuaishou says 99.7 percent of its live-stream transcoding runs on the chip, and Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud and Bilibili buy it despite running video platforms of their own.
The bet on generation, not just compression
The next chip changes the problem. Built on fully domestic 3D stacking with hybrid bonding, it taped out in April and returned from the fab this month, with volume shipments planned next year. It pairs a RISC-V design tuned for deterministic latency with near-memory architecture, and the software stack has been adapted to Qwen, Hunyuan Video and MiniMax.
Transcoding is a smaller bet than a frontier accelerator, but every video platform pays that bill daily. Moving into generation multiplies the compute.
The harder test is whether customers stay once the product shifts from compressing video to creating it.
