Alibaba Group leads a new funding round for a Chinese AI company

Chinese technology and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings led the largest single funding round for a Chinese emerging artificial intelligence company.

The latest episode in the series of major investments by the Chinese group indicates that it has once again returned to using its funds to capitalize on growth opportunities.

Ali Baba joined Tencent Holdings and American technology companies like Microsoft Corp in heavily betting on industrial artificial intelligence technology used by the AI-powered chat platform ChatGPT.

Alibaba invested a billion dollars in the one-year-old AI startup Monshou AI, whose market value increased eight times to around $2 billion, according to informed sources.

Bloomberg news agency quoted sources as saying that the list of investors in Monshout also includes Long Zhe Hongshan, the investment arm of the food delivery company Meituan.

Monsut, established in March 2023, is one of the most prominent emerging companies in China that focuses on developing generative artificial intelligence, hoping to become like the American company OpenAI, which is known for developing the chatbot platform GPT.

In November last year, Monshou launched its own AI-powered chatbot platform called Kimi. Since then, they have also launched a platform for developers to create AI applications that align with their model. When Monshou secured its first round of funding, its market value was only $300 million.