The investment boom in the artificial intelligence field is accelerating from 2D to 3D. AI 3D unicorn company VAST (Sanqi Wuyu) officially announced on September 1st the completion of its B and B+ rounds of funding, with a total financing amount of approximately 3 billion RMB, led by Sequoia Capital. To date, within less than six months, VAST's cumulative financing has exceeded 5.7 billion RMB, making it one of the most capital-pursued companies in the 3D-native intelligent industry with the highest financing density.
Looking at the investor matrix of VAST, it can be found that it is backed by three core forces: financial capital, industrial giants, and local state-owned capital. Financial investors such as Sequoia Capital and Qiming Venture Partners focus on the broad potential space of 3D content generation as the next-generation AI foundational capability; cross-industry industrial capital including Perfect World, 37 Games, 4399, Tanyou Games, Giant Network, Geely Capital, Blue Sky Advertising, and Zhongke Technology have collectively entered the market, aiming to integrate AI 3D technology into real business processes such as game production, automotive industrial design, smart manufacturing, and advertising marketing. In addition, local state-owned capital such as Yizhuang State-owned Capital Investment and Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Investment frequently appear, providing strong support for their regional industrial layout.
This highly anticipated company was founded in Beijing in November 2022 by Song Yachen, born in 1997. Song Yachen graduated from Johns Hopkins University and joined SenseTime in 2019 to work on AIGC 3D-related technologies. Later, he joined the founding team of MiniMax as the 001 employee. The core team also has a deep technical background. CTO Liang Ding and Chief Scientist Cao Yanpei both graduated from Tsinghua University and have long been engaged in generative 3D research at top laboratories such as SenseTime, Kuaishou, and Tencent.
Regarding the long-standing pain points of AI 3D — that generated models have only external appearances but are difficult to directly apply to industrial pipelines — Song Yachen's team focused on how to make AI-generated 3D assets truly usable. On September 1st, VAST simultaneously released Tripo P2.0. This model, based on its self-developed Nexus generation framework, achieved the first end-to-end generation of native quadrilateral topology meshes, achieving breakthroughs in accuracy, face number control, local editing, and component splitting, truly realizing "engine usable, animation binding possible, and editing accessible." Moreover, its world model research project, Project Eden, further aims to build a virtual world with physical rules, long-term evolution, and support for multi-user interaction, providing a simulation foundation for embodied intelligence training.
With continuous iteration of underlying technologies, VAST's commercialization process is also accelerating comprehensively. As of July 2025, its annual recurring revenue (ARR) had reached 12 million USD; by September 2026, the all-in-one AI 3D platform Tripo Studio had attracted millions of creators worldwide, and the basic model had successfully integrated into the workflows of NetEase's games "Duck Life" and "Yanyun Sixteen Voices," as well as 3D printing companies like Tuozhu and Zongwei Cube, and the film and television industry. In the future, the newly raised funds will continue to be used for the iteration of 3D-native models and data capabilities, infrastructure construction, and the deep expansion of the commercialization ecosystem.