Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who died at age 78 in Sydney, Australia on Monday, had a long and varied résumé.
Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse said today that it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that, with the new tranche of funding, its valuation has crossed over $2 billion. With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.
The company closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While it didn’t disclose the funding amount, Bloomberg reported it to be in the range of $300 million. PixVerse said that investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s LionX Ventures.
The company was founded by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie in 2023. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, and Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.
PixVerse offers multiple models, including a V-Series video model for consumer and API use, a C-Series video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development and world building, which was released earlier this year.
Through its tool, users can generate videos in up to 4k resolution with audio baked in. The startup said that its consumer product has over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to specify how many of them are paying users but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute of generation for image-to-video.
Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity for video generation to succeed only a few companies are making progress in the market.
“OpenAI exited the business when they shut down Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent are not able to create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he told TechCrunch.
He said that there is equal opportunity in the consumer and enterprise markets as users are creating videos for fun and also consuming short video content made with AI, while enterprises are using video generation for creative, learning, and marketing use cases.
However, saying that the startup’s model produces a “high-quality” output is hardly a unique qualifier. Xie mentioned that its core strength lies in labeling.
“We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately, and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video generation platform,” Xie said.
The company has big ambitions this year. It wants to expand its enterprise outreach across the globe. The startup already has a deal with its investor Alibaba to deploy the video generation features.
In terms of product roll out, it plans to launch a new V-series model for video generation, and release a new version of its world model this year. It has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. With the new funding PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and people in go-to-market function.
Despite its confidence in its own models and products, the video market is heating up. There are players like ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth and Kling AI from Asia. In the west, there are competitors like Midjourney, Runway and Luma. Multiple companies, including Lann YeCunn and Fei Fei Li’s startups, are building world models.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at pub
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who died at age 78 in Sydney, Australia on Monday, had a long and varied résumé. He played everyone from an international spy (Possession) and a detective chief inspector (Peaky Blinders) to a legendary wizard (Merlin). He even played the literal spawn of the devil (Omen III: The Final Conflict).But throughout his career, Neill was also known for scientist roles in films like The Dish and Event Horizon, with none more celebrated than Dr. Alan Grant, the rugged paleontologist and undisputed hero of Jurassic Park.As fans paid tribute to Neill, remembering both his wonderful performances and the charming updates about the farm animals on his idyllic New Zealand vineyard, one clear theme emerged with respect to the iconic Dr. Grant.“How many of us were inspired to become scientists after watching Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler?” wrote Lucky Tran, the director of science communication at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in a post on X that included an image of Neill and costar Laura Dern examining a sick triceratops in a scene from Jurassic Park. Thomas Ronge, a marine geologist working for the Scientific Ocean Drilling Coordination Office (SODCO) at Texas A&M University, shared on Bluesky that the sci-fi blockbuster had led him to pursue studies in paleontology, and that while he had ultimately gone into a different field, “I'm always Dr. Grant at heart.”Speaking for myself, I can say that after seeing Jurassic Park at age 9, I entertained great dreams of being a paleontologist like Alan Grant (or perhaps an actor, like Sam Neill). Just what was it about this character that had kids clamoring to apply to STEM programs?“The heroes of my favorite movie were level headed scientists who used their wits, not guns or physical strength, to overcome obstacles,” Kevin Holloway, who worked as a neuroscience researcher at the University of Oregon in the late aughts and early ‘10s, tells WIRED. “They also had a clarity of purpose and absolute conviction in their beliefs.”As Grant, he says, Neill was “the ‘quintessential ‘man of science’ role model [by] which all others are measured.” Ultimately, Holloway didn’t pursue a PhD, and he now works as a nurse “doing diabetic foot care, advanced wound care, and street outreach”—but he still “absolutely” credits Neill’s turn as Grant for steering him into science.Jurassic Park hit theaters when Jim Porter was 23 and completing his undergraduate studies with a geology field camp in the western US, he recalls. “I read the [Michael] Crichton novel on the way there, then saw the movie in a small town theater,” he says, noting that the field work was “certainly different after that.” He loved Neill's “convincing and endearing portrayal of a scientist whose priority was understanding and revering Earth's history rather than opportunistically monetizing it,” saying this “reinforced my career choice as an environmental scientist.”It wasn’t merely Grant’s distinction and principles as a researcher that made him such an aspirational figure for so many. He was also a potent counterexample to the violent, macho action stars of the 1980s and 1990s.“He's believable as a field scientist and also has such a gruff kindness about him,” says Jamie Anderson, who earned a DPhil in archaeological sciences from the University of Oxford in 2018 and calls Jurassic Park her favorite film. She cites “the way he takes on looking after the kids even though they've been driving him nuts” and his treatment of Dr. Sattler “as his equal and someone he's proud of” as reasons that Grant made “a great antidote to more toxic masculine figures in many other action movies, especially from that era.”James, who works as a civil engineer in Orlando, Florida, and requested to withhold his last name out of professional concerns, offers a similar assessment of Grant as a direct, accomplished, and brilliant man without the off-putting arrogance. “Sam Neill’s character and how he responded to everyo
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