London-based Haiper, a video creation AI platform, came out of stealth mode and announced on Tuesday that it had secured $13.8 million (about 12.6 million euros) in an initial funding round led by Octopus Ventures.
This round brings Haiper’s total funding to $19.2 million (approximately 17.6 million euros) ahead of a Series A round in 2024.
The company will use the funds to develop and launch a series of large-scale training models that will push the boundaries of technology-based creativity and imagination.
Haiper: Building a foundational model for visual content
Founded by Dr. Yishu Miao (CEO) and Dr. Ziyu Wang (CTO), Haiper is building a foundational model for visual content that enables anyone, even those with no technical experience, to create high-quality video content.
To advance video generation AI, companies must scale their models and data to understand the physics of the world.
Every frame of video contains microscopic visual information, from light to motion, texture, and object interactions.
When generative AI can intuitively replicate reality, it can create amazing, realistic content, like linen shirts moving in the wind or water splashes of water.
The team at the UK company is training perception-based models through a distributed data processing and model training infrastructure designed to scale.
Haiper currently offers a text-to-video tool that allows users to enter written prompts.
These prompts are then used to create short video content, ranging from practical and creative requests like “scary video game avatars” to funny and thought-provoking prompts that can be shared on social media.
Haiper says users have full creative license over the direction of their content and can continuously modify characters, objects, backgrounds, artistic styles, and more, giving them detailed control over the final visual product.
Dr. Yishu Miao, co-founder and CEO of Haiper, said: “Our ultimate goal is to build a fully sentient AGI with unlimited potential to support creativity. Our visual-based model will take AI’s ability to deeply understand the physics of the world and replicate the essence of reality in the videos it generates, taking it one step further. “These advances lay the foundation for AI to understand, embrace, and enhance human storytelling.”
“As the barrier between ideation and implementation is lowered, Haiper’s powerful foundational model will give many in the industry the opportunity to develop amazing content and visualize ideas in ways never before possible. We have spent time behind closed doors building critical distributed data processing and model training infrastructure, and we are excited to use these funds to expand,” Miao added.
investor
Octopus is a multi-stage venture capital investor specializing in B2B software, bio, climate, consumer, deep tech, fintech and health. Each year, VCs distribute over £200M to help their portfolio companies scale rapidly.
Rebecca Hunt, Partner at Octopus Ventures, adds: “At Octopus, we look forward to supporting exceptionally talented founders with unique insights into the market and a strong technical edge. Only resilient and experienced teams can build cutting-edge products and solutions, and Haiper is no different. Haiper’s deep technological foundation has allowed us to innovate and achieve breakthroughs at a pace not yet seen in the AI video space. They are sure to become one of the big AI players in Europe. We look forward to continuing to support Yishu and Ziyu on their mission to change the world.”