01 / OVERVIEW
Nearly $200 million, unicorn status
VAST has become the newest Chinese AI company to cross a $1 billion valuation. The Beijing-based 3D generation startup, founded by a 29-year-old gamer, announced a funding round of nearly $200 million.
Ince Capital and a venture fund backed by China Life Insurance led the round, the company said in a statement, with Genesis Capital joining alongside existing investors Eminence Ventures and Primavera Venture Partners. VAST declined to give an exact valuation but said it now sits above $1 billion.
02 / OVERVIEW
Tripo Studio: a 20-million-user business
The company — whose backers also include Alibaba and Baidu — builds Tripo Studio, a platform that lets developers and creative professionals turn text and image prompts into 3D models. Subscriptions start at $20 a month, with additional fees tied to token consumption.
Founder Simon Song told Bloomberg News that most of the platform’s 20 million users are in the US, with Europe, Japan and South Korea next. By his estimate, VAST could turn a profit within two years.
“In my view, 3D models are the most foundational because they are an uncompressed reflection of the real world.”
03 / OVERVIEW
Competition and skepticism in production-grade 3D
In production-grade 3D for video games, filmmaking, 3D printing and industrial applications, VAST competes with Tencent’s Hunyuan 3D and Silicon Valley startup Meshy. All of these platforms are betting that generative workflows — the kind popularized by AI chatbots and video generators — can replace traditional 3D software.
Truly commercial breakthroughs are still rare, though, in gaming — a roughly $200 billion industry that is potentially the technology’s most lucrative market, and one that remains broadly skeptical. “When people discuss foundation models, the conversation is almost always about language models,” Song said. “But in my view, 3D models are the most foundational because they are an uncompressed reflection of the real world.”
04 / OVERVIEW
From the P-series to the Project Eden world model
VAST says its latest P-series model outputs low-poly, game-ready assets, sidestepping a common limitation of AI-generated 3D: hours of manual editing before a model can actually be used.
A world model called Project Eden is slated for release as soon as this month. Instead of flat video frames, it produces 3D environments that can be explored end to end — similar territory to Marble, the platform from computer-vision pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs.
05 / OVERVIEW
NetEase and an “interactive TikTok”
The technology is already in players’ hands through a partnership with Chinese gaming giant NetEase: in the role-playing game Where Winds Meet, players can turn an uploaded photo into an interactive 3D avatar on the spot.
Enterprise partnerships aside, the 150-person company also wants mass consumers. An upcoming app Song calls an “interactive TikTok” will serve bite-sized interactive experiences in place of an endless scroll of short videos. “The internet’s third revolution could be interactive content — where AI generates tailored material and 3D becomes the main new medium,” said Joy Dai, a managing director at Eminence, one of the round’s investors.
06 / OVERVIEW
From Civilization player to founder
Song founded VAST in 2023, assembling a team of technologists he had worked with at AI firm SenseTime. Earlier he had been a founding member of large-language-model developer MiniMax, but a passion for animation and gaming pulled him toward what was then an overlooked market: 3D models.
At Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in international studies, he would spend whole days on the strategy game Civilization. “Simon is the type of CEO China’s tech-driven startups desperately need,” said Steven Hu, a founding partner of Ince Capital. “He’s so infectiously optimistic that at first, he sounded a bit unrealistic — very much an American-style entrepreneur.”
SOURCE / Bloomberg
Gen-Z Gamer's 3D-Model Startup VAST Becomes China's Latest AI Unicorn
This article is an original editorial adaptation of the original piece from Bloomberg.