36Kr debuted | Mofa Technology completed a $130 million financing, hoping to "build a meta-universe infrastructure"

On April 6, Meta-Universe Infrastructure Company Mofa Technology announced the completion of consecutive series B and C rounds of financing, with a total amount of 130 million US dollars. Among them, the B round of financing was jointly invested by Fresh Capital and Jinsha Capital, Sequoia China and Wuyuan Capital invested three consecutive rounds of additional investment; the C round of financing of 110 million US dollars was jointly led by SoftBank Vision Fund Phase 2 and a well-known strategic investment institution, followed by Northern Lights Venture Capital and Index Venture Capital, and Index Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2018, Mofa Technology is a technology company with computer graphics and AI technology as the core, with full-stack end-to-end virtual content intelligent production, virtual person creation and operation technology, and has developed professional and consumer-level virtual live broadcast technology, as well as a three-dimensional AI virtual person capability platform, to create a full-stack product matrix.

Courtesy of Mofa Technology

Dr. Chai Jinxiang, founder and CEO of Mofa Technology, introduced to 36Kr that the company's products include: Xmov virtual content collaborative production intelligent cloud platform that reduces the threshold for metaverse content production, increases production capacity, and accelerates the scale of metaverse content by creating end-to-end intelligent tools; Avatar that covers To B professional and To C consumer application scenarios by creating mature standardized, full-stack virtual live broadcast and social interaction products; and AI virtual human capability platform AI based on artificial intelligence technology Human, which can realize the "creation-cultivation-application" of fully intelligent virtual people, helps To B professional and To C consumer customers to create AI virtual people in one stop, and implements virtual digital people into various application scenarios, such as virtual customer service, virtual sales, virtual teachers, virtual human resources officers, e-commerce anchors, virtual training, etc.

With the original full-stack AI performance animation technology, intelligent modeling and binding technology, virtual content intelligent collaborative production technology, virtual live broadcast technology and AI virtual person technology accumulation, Mofa Technology has achieved many breakthroughs in creating virtual world infrastructure and creating high-quality, efficient and intelligent virtual content.

At present, Mofa Technology has cooperated with many upstream studios, as well as downstream industry customers including game companies, entertainment film and television companies, Internet platform companies, consumer goods companies, technology companies, etc., and has built ecological barriers with participants in all aspects of the industrial chain.

Up to now, Mofa Technology has served more than 200 enterprise customers, covering games, entertainment, consumption, e-commerce, finance, technology, education, medical care, cultural tourism and other industries.

Among them, the virtual content collaborative intelligent production cloud platform not only creates an original virtual IP Ling, but also creates a virtual image spokesperson or high-quality virtual content for Alibaba, Tencent, CCTV, L'Oréal, Quduoduo (Kraft), Yili, Mengniu, iFLYTEK and other well-known enterprises. Virtual live broadcast technology and products serve virtual IP including Ye Xiu (Yuwen), Linghu (Tencent), Octopus Lady (Alibaba), Saratoga (Station B), XiaoAi Classmate (Xiaomi), Sister M (L'Oréal), etc. AI Virtual Man has served head customers such as ByteDance, OPPO, Xinhua News Agency, China Mobile, China Construction Bank, Everbright Bank, Huaxia Bank, Bank of Nanjing, Taiping Insurance and so on.

Chai Jinxiang said that based on the full-stack technology capabilities, Mofa Technology provides platform solutions for the large-scale, interactive and intelligent production of three-dimensional virtual content, and will provide more virtual consumer services and products in the future, further extending the application scenario to "virtual + X".

"Mofa Technology hopes to build a meta-universe of 'hydropower and coal', so that all enterprises and all ordinary people can create their own virtual people through platform-based services and the smallest cost in the future, produce high-quality virtual content, and create value in the virtual ecology of virtual reality and the interaction of all things." Chai Jinxiang said.

Dr. Chai Jinxiang, founder and CEO of Mofa Technology, said that the essence of the metacosm is to upgrade the information carrier and interactive mode with three-dimensional native virtual content and virtual people as the core, and the value of Mofa is to focus on providing infrastructure for the scale, interaction and intelligence of virtual content and virtual people, and empowering all walks of life to enter the meta-universe era. The financing funds will be mainly used for product research and development investment, multi-scenario market expansion in the whole industry, upstream and downstream ecological construction and layout, and further expand Mofa's leading edge in technology, products and markets.

"Three-dimensional virtual content has been widely used in games, film and television, social networking and other fields, and as the basic components of the metaverse, the production capacity of three-dimensional virtual content will become a scarce resource in the metaverse era." Zhang Kaixun, managing partner of SoftBank Vision Fund, the leader of the C round, said: "Compared with the traditional single-point software tools and man-intensive content production processes, the end-to-end full-stack virtual content and virtual person intelligent production product matrix independently developed by Mofa can greatly improve the production efficiency of three-dimensional virtual content and virtual people, and empower large-scale and intelligent production. We believe that Mofa's full-link intelligent technology can bring a new round of technological changes to the traditional three-dimensional content production industry, and we are also optimistic that Mofa will become the infrastructure for virtual content production in the meta-universe era. ”

Deng Feng, founding managing partner of Northern Light Venture Capital, said that the next generation of Internet platforms will be mainly in the form of 3D media, and virtual people will play an important information carrier. The current 3D modeling industry lacks process, standardization, high cost, low efficiency, high cost of virtual people, difficult to popularize and application landing, Northern Lights continues to look for industry disruptors. As a global leader in the field of AI+CG, Professor Chai has led Mofa to achieve remarkable results, with a wealth of technologies and product lines. The metaverse is not far away, and the Northern Lights believe that with the establishment of the Mofa ecology, virtual human technology can change the existing interactive forms and media forms in many industries.

Sequoia China led an angel round of financing from Mofa Technology and has since made two additional investments. Wang Hao, managing director of Sequoia China, said that he is optimistic about the application prospects of the company's technology in Metavalse, AR/VR, virtual content and virtual people.

Cheng Yu, a partner at Wuyuan Capital, also said that in the face of a huge wave of slow development like Metavalse, technology "infrastructure" is a core challenge and a major opportunity.

Chai Jinxiang holds a Ph.D. from the Robotics Research Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and was a tenured professor at TAMU, a famous American engineering university, before founding Mofa Technology, and has more than 20 years of research experience in the fields of graphics, three-dimensional virtual people, and AI. The core members of the team come from Well-known enterprises and universities such as Microsoft Research, TAMU, Tsinghua, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University and so on.