Chinese artificial intelligence startup Shengshu Technology announced on Friday that it has raised 2 billion yuan ($292.59 million) in a funding round led by Alibaba Cloud. The company stated that the capital will be utilized to develop a "universal world model," which processes sensory information to simulate human perception and interaction, representing a step forward in achieving artificial general intelligence for the physical world. Shengshu Technology did not disclose a timeline for the commercial deployment of this system.

Founded in early 2023 by Zhu Jun, an alumnus of Tsinghua University, Shengshu Technology launched Vidu in April 2024, becoming the first Chinese company to release a video generation model. The model was initially positioned as a competitor to OpenAI's Sora, a project which OpenAI later discontinued. Subsequently, Shengshu Technology has released several updated versions of Vidu, including the Vidu Q3 model launched earlier this year.

The company has recently expanded into the robotics application domain. In December 2025, it open-sourced the Motus model, which is designed to control robots by processing multimodal data, including video and audio.