Enflame Technology, a Tencent-backed Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chip maker, announced on Thursday the completion of its Series D funding round at 2 billion yuan ($273.7 million) from investors including funds affiliated with a state capital investor in Shanghai.
The Series D round was co-led by a few funds backed by Shanghai International Group, a state capital operator that manages 140 billion yuan ($19.2 billion) in assets, Enflame announced in a post on its official WeChat account.
New and existing investors including Chinese photo editing app owner Meitu and Tencent Holdings, which has worked with Enflame in developing an AI chip called “Zixiao” for processing images, videos, and natural languages, participated in the deal.
A range of domestic investors in China also joined the Series D round, including SummitView Capital, YTI Capital, Hundreds Capital, Redpoint China Ventures, and GF Qianhe Investment.
Founded in March 2018, the Shanghai-based company has introduced products like AI-based high-performance, general-purpose chips, AI accelerators designed for cloud training in data centres, as well as supporting software. Its solutions have been adopted in areas including internet, finance, computing centres, autonomous driving, and smart city applications.
Enflame is led by Zhao Lidong, the firm’s chief executive officer and chairman of the board who previously held senior positions at China’s state-owned semiconductor conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup. The other co-founder Zhang Yalin, now its chief operating officer, had a 10-year tenure at US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where he contributed to AMD’s semiconductor development at its Shanghai R&D centre.
The Series D round is the largest venture financing raised by Enflame to date. Prior to this round, the firm secured 1.8 billion yuan ($246.4 million) in a Series C round jointly led by Primavera Capital Group, CITIC Private Equity (CPE), and CICC Capital in January 2021.
This sizeable deal was followed by the completion of an extended Series C round from China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund II, also known as China’s “Big Fund,” in June 2022.
Enflame counts Tencent as one of its earliest institutional investors. Tencent led its 340-million-yuan ($46.5 million) Series Pre-A round in July 2018.