Image Source: Yuanbao

TMTPOST -- China’s leading AI infrastructure service provider SiliconFlow has raised tens of millions of dollars in a pre-A funding round. The money will be used for the iterative upgrade and market expansion of the AI cloud computing power infrastructure.

This round was led by China Growth Capital and followed by Puhua Capital, with oversubscribed contributions from existing investor Glory Ventures. China Renaissance acted as the financial advisor. The company’s founder, Yuan Jinhui, revealed that the funds raised will be used to further develop its AI cloud computing infrastructure, focusing on iterative upgrades and market expansion.

Enhanced by strategic partnerships with top-tier cloud providers, chip manufacturers, and AI companies like Huawei, AWS, and Nvidia, SiliconFlow is poised to expand its presence in the market of cloud computation products.

Founded in August 2023, SiliconFlow aims to provide high-performance, cost-effective AI cloud computing solutions. With a mission to build an AI infrastructure (AI Infra) platform for large models, SiliconFlow fosters collaboration across algorithms, systems, and hardware to democratize AI applications.

SiliconFlow launched SiliconCloud, a platform featuring the DeepSeek-R1 and V3 models, powered by Huawei Cloud's Ascend Cloud. Deployed on domestically produced chips, these models offer faster inference speeds and reduced costs, comparable to high-end GPUs. The platform, with over three million users and billions of token calls processed daily, provides developers with competitive pricing, end-to-end support, and a variety of models, including DeepSeek-R1, V3, Qwen, and CosyVoice.

To enhance its ecosystem, SiliconFlow introduced BizyAir, a plugin enabling mixed local node operations with ComfyUI, allowing developers to bypass GPU limitations for image generation tasks. This innovation broadens AI application possibilities.

In terms of ecosystem and commercialization, SiliconFlow has established key partnerships with top-tier cloud providers, chip manufacturers, and AI companies, including Huawei, Amazon Web Services, and Nvidia.

These collaborations have helped SiliconFlow build a strong global ecosystem advantage, enabling the company to implement large-scale AI applications in fields such as language models, text-to-image generation, and video generation. For enterprise clients, SiliconFlow offers several service models, including dedicated instances, computing power management, private Model-as-a-Service (MaaS), and all-in-one machines based on Huawei Ascend 910 series NPUs.

Investors, including managing partners Haiyan Wu and Jun Chu, express confidence in SiliconFlow's potential leadership in the AI infrastructure space. The company plans to leverage partnerships and continue innovation, aiming to become a pivotal player in the AI industry by accelerating the advent of AGI and driving AI innovation.

“In fact, we have been paying attention to DeepSeek for a long time. It has always been a very unique and eye-catching presence in the open-source community. Unfortunately, there was no investment opportunity,” said Wu Haiyan, the managing partner of China Growth Capital.

As a reasoning acceleration engine cloud platform, Silicon Flow acts as a "connector" between numerous open - source models and AI applications. In a sense, it also allows us to realize our original intention of supporting domestic open - source models and the AI application ecosystem, Wu added.