Beijing-based artificial intelligence company HiDream.ai has completed a RMB 1.5 billion Series C financing round to accelerate its development of native omni-modal world models and expand its commercial ecosystem. The transaction was co-led by the National Social Security Fund Sichuan Revitalization Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, ICBC Capital, Hongyi Asset Management, and Dunhong Capital. HiDream.ai said the financing lifts the capital raised across three rounds in the past three months to more than RMB 2.1 billion and marks its entry into unicorn status.
Diverse Investors Back Expansion
The Series C attracted a broad group of financial, government-backed, and strategic investors, reflecting growing interest in companies developing foundational AI systems. New participants included Xiamen ITG Capital, Shanghai Film New Vision Fund, Hubei Yangtze River Industry Investment Group, Huace Film & TV, Yuhang Financial Holding, and Bank of Communications Capital, while several existing shareholders increased their support. According to the company, the mix of long-term institutional capital and regional investment platforms will provide resources for research, product development, infrastructure, and deployment across multiple industries.
Strengthening Content Industry Links
The addition of film and entertainment investors gives HiDream.ai closer access to production environments, industry data, and potential customers for its generative AI technology. The company is already working with Shanghai Film on content production, cinema applications, cross-screen marketing, and AI-supported large-screen workflows, while planned cooperation with Huace Film & TV will cover agent-assisted creation, corpus development, content production, and intellectual property commercialization. These relationships are intended to support practical testing of video models and deepen the company’s presence in China’s film and entertainment ecosystem.
Advancing Native Omni-Modal Models
Founded in 2023, HiDream.ai develops large AI models designed to process and generate information across multiple formats rather than relying on separately connected single-modality systems. Its HiDream-O1 model family is built on the company’s Unified Transformer architecture, which seeks to represent images, text, video, audio, and other inputs within a shared framework. Earlier in 2026, the company introduced HiDream-O1-Image-Pro, a closed-source model with more than 200 billion parameters, alongside an open-source version that achieved a leading position on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-image rankings.
Scaling Products and Commercial Reach
HiDream.ai is pairing its foundation-model research with agent products designed for commercial marketing, entertainment production, and digital content creation. Its operating framework combines the HiDream model family, a standardized capability platform, and applications including vivago R1, a multimodal creative agent introduced at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference with long-form video generation and editing capabilities. The company says its products now reach more than 50 million professional users and over 40,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries and regions.
Strategic Direction
Founder and CEO Mei Tao said the company views the shift from conventional multimodal AI toward native omni-modal systems as an important route to artificial general intelligence. HiDream.ai’s longer-term objective is to build world models capable of understanding, reasoning about, predicting, and constructing dynamic environments, rather than focusing only on content generation. The new funding is expected to support continued model research, agent development, international collaboration, and the expansion of industry-specific applications.
HiDream.ai’s Series C gives the company substantial new capital at a time when competition is intensifying around visual generation, multimodal systems, and world-model architectures. The participation of institutional, regional, venture, and entertainment investors also indicates that the company’s strategy is being evaluated not only as a research effort but as a platform for commercial deployment. Its next challenge will be converting technical performance and a large reported user base into durable products, defensible partnerships, and sustained revenue across global markets.