PixVerse closes Series C extension, valuation crosses $2B

Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse has closed an extension to its Series C funding round, bringing the total raised in that round to $439 million and pushing its valuation past $2 billion, the company told TechCrunch on July 13, 2026.

The extension follows PixVerse's initial Series C close in March 2026, led by CDH Investments, which Bloomberg had reported at roughly $300 million. The gap between that figure and the eventual $439 million round total reflects the size of the extension tranche now disclosed. New backers in the extension include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joined by returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC's LionX Ventures.

PixVerse was founded in 2023 by Wang Changhu, a former ByteDance computer vision researcher, and Jaden Xie, previously an executive director at Lighthouse Capital. The company now employs 150 people across offices in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai, having opened its Singapore global headquarters in March 2026 alongside the initial Series C close, and its first U.S. office in Bellevue, Washington that same month, where it hired a veteran leader from Salesforce (GeekWire).

The company's product line spans three tiers: a V-Series model aimed at consumer and API use cases, a C-Series built for professional film and commercial production workflows, and an R-Series of world models targeted at game development and world-building. The R-Series debuted earlier in 2026 with R1, which PixVerse has described as the first real-time world model on the market (PixVerse blog). The company plans to release a new V-Series model and an updated version of the world model later in 2026.

On the consumer side, PixVerse reports more than 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly actives. Its image-to-video generation is priced at $4.80 per minute, with output available at up to 4K resolution and audio generated natively rather than added as a separate post-production step.

Alibaba's involvement predates the current round: it led PixVerse's $60 million Series B in September 2025 (Yahoo Finance) and has since become a commercial partner, with a deal in place to deploy PixVerse's video generation features across Alibaba's own products.

Jaden Xie told TechCrunch that OpenAI has effectively exited the video generation business following its shutdown of Sora 2, a characterization that frames the competitive field PixVerse now operates in. Named competitors include ByteDance's Seedance, Video Rebirth — built by former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu — Kling AI, and Midjourney.

The company has also pursued higher-profile positioning beyond core product sales. It partnered with the UN AI for Good Global Summit 2026, inviting global AI video submissions (Businesswire), and it launched a KAGAMI Gate proof-of-concept tied to the FIFA World Cup 2026. Earlier in the year, it shipped V6, an upgrade to its consumer and API video model, and published a company blog post framing its own trajectory as a shift "from creation tool to production platform."

PixVerse has itself described the March round as Asia's largest funding round in AI video to date, a claim made in its own announcement rather than independently verified by TechCrunch's reporting.

The arithmetic here is worth sitting with for a moment. A round that Bloomberg pegged near $300 million in March has, within four months, grown by roughly $140 million in an extension tranche, and the valuation has more than doubled from the unicorn threshold it crossed in March to over $2 billion now. That pace of re-rating, in a sector where foundation model providers routinely cut prices and occasionally exit categories outright, says something about how investors are currently pricing applied video generation versus the underlying model layer.

Xie's comment about OpenAI's exit from video generation is the kind of claim that deserves scrutiny rather than repetition. Sora 2's shutdown removed one well-resourced generalist competitor, but it does not necessarily follow that the category itself has consolidated around specialists — ByteDance, Tencent-adjacent Video Rebirth, Kling, and Midjourney are all still actively shipping in the same space, and Alibaba itself has both invested in PixVerse and presumably retains internal video capabilities of its own.

What the round does confirm is that specialized, workflow-specific video models — consumer-facing, professional-production-facing, and world-building-facing — are attracting capital independent of whichever general-purpose foundation model happens to be dominant at a given moment. Whether that specialization proves durable once foundation labs re-enter with cheaper, more capable general models is the open question the next funding cycle will likely answer.