Beyond DeepSeek: Rising Chinese AI Firms To Watch in 2025

Key Takeaways

• The disruptive success of DeepSeek has highlighted the growing number of smaller Chinese AI firms reshaping the AI race.
• China has been playing catch up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT since its release in 2022.
• AI firms in China have had to navigate a complex regulatory environment.

China’s AI industry is experiencing a meteoric rise after AI firm DeepSeek positioned itself as a serious challenger to leading Western AI giants.

China has primarily been playing catch-up following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. So far, the biggest rivals to the U.S. have come from the country’s leading companies, such as Alibaba and Baidu.

However, DeepSeek’s tiny budget and disruptive success have highlighted the growing number of smaller Chinese AI firms vying for the top spot.

MiniMax

MiniMax, founded in 2021 in Shanghai, has rapidly emerged as a significant player in China’s AI landscape.

The company primarily focuses on creating consumer-facing applications and large-scale AI models. MiniMax has seen success overseas with its AI consumer applications.

Talkie, an English-language avatar chatbot app launched in June 2023, allows users to engage in conversations with AI-generated personas of celebrities.

The application has seen significant success in the U.S., boasting over 28 million monthly active users.

The company’s growth has been bolstered by substantial investments from the country’s leading companies, including a $600 million funding round led by Alibaba Group in March 2024.

Shengshu Technology

Shengshu AI is another rising AI startup from China. It focuses on competing with OpenAI’s video-generation tool, Sora.

Founded in March 2023, the firm’s text-to-video models claim to enable a “smarter, faster and more scalable” method for content creation.

The company’s flagship Vidu tool claims to maintain consistency in video generation, a key challenge in AI video generation.

Shengshu recently announced the release of an API platform for Vidu, allowing enterprises and developers to integrate Vidu’s technology.

The company said users will gain access to high-quality AI-generated videos for film editing, mobile ads and social media visuals.

Tang Jiayu, Shengshu CEO, previously stated that Vidu can reduce video production costs by around 97.5%.

01.AI

01.AI, founded by a former Google and Microsoft executive, has become a rising star in China’s AI industry.

In November 2023, just eight months after its inception, the company achieved a valuation exceeding $1 billion, following a funding round that included Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investors.

The company released its open-source model in November 2023, outperforming Meta’s Llama 2, at the time.

Founder and CEO Kai-Fu Lee told WIRED the company’s aim is to be the first to build a series of “killer apps” off the back of its language models.

“The apps that won the mobile era are mobile-first, like Uber, WeChat, Instagram, TikTok,” Lee said. “The next-gen productivity tools shouldn’t look like Office anymore—Word, Excel, PowerPoint—that’s the wrong way to go.”

Infinigence AI

Infinigence AI is a Chinese-based startup looking to do something different from other AI firms. The company focuses on creating infrastructure and computing clusters to deploy AI actions.

In September 2024, the AI firm secured approximately $70.2 million in a Series A financing round, bringing its total funding to almost over $140 million.

The company said it aims to cut almost the complete cost of deploying AI models by “activating diverse heterogeneous computing power and optimizing the synergy between hardware and software, making them as accessible as utilities like water and electricity.”

“This will become a new form of productive force that benefits the whole industry and accelerates the inclusive progress of artificial general intelligence,” the company said.

China’s “Six Tigers” of AI and Regulatory Approval

At the forefront of China’s AI cohort, a select group of startups known as the “Six Tigers” have emerged as the leaders in innovation.

The group includes Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, Moonshot, StepFun, MiniMax and 01.AI. All six companies have a valuation of over $1 billion each.

In July 2024, Baichuan AI secured $691 million in funding from China’s most prominent technology giants, smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp, Alibaba and Tencent.

Baichuan AI became one of the first companies to gain regulatory approval from China’s government to launch its open-source large language model.

AI companies operating in China have been forced to navigate a complex regulatory environment shaped by the government’s efforts to balance innovation with control.

However, following DeepSeek’s success, President Xi Jinping held a rare meeting with enterprise executives to show support for the private tech sector.