Low-profile AI firm MetaSota has received a fresh cash injection led by Ant Group, according to a LatePost report, as the Alipay owner adds the Chinese company to its artificial intelligence investment portfolio.
The over RMB 100 million ($13.9 million) round of fundraising propelled six-year-old MetaSota’s valuation to $150 million.
Why it matters: The deal is the latest in a series of investments secured by Chinese artificial intelligence companies, despite amounting to considerably less than the billions of yuan committed to MetaSota’s rivals in the field in recent months.
Details: LatePost reported that Baidu and Tencent also considered participating in the financing, but fintech giant Ant Group finally sealed the deal with investment fund Lightspeed China Partners.
- Another of MetaSota founder Min Kerui’s ventures, Chinese natural language analysis cloud service provider BosonNLP, was acquired by Ant Group in 2018. That same year, Min built MetaSota, since becoming a hub of artificial intelligence products including a legal AI translation tool and article generation software.
- In March, MetaSota launched an AI-powered search tool and received over 7 million visits, making it the third most-used tool in a flurry of AI products in China that month, trailing only Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and Moonshot AI’s Kimi, according to traffic-monitoring platform SimilarWeb.
Context: Beyond MetaSota, Ant Group has invested in at least six Chinese AI companies since ChatGPT kicked off the artificial intelligence product boom. Large model trainers ZhipuAI and Moonshot AI, video generation companies AIsphere and ShengshuAI, as well as chip firm MoffettAI have all received funding from the fintech giant.
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