London-based Haiper, a video-generative AI platform, has come out of stealth mode and announced on Tuesday that it has secured $13.8M (approximately €12.6M) in a seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures.
The latest round brings Haiper’s total funding to $19.2M (approximately €17.6M) ahead of its raising a Series A round in 2024.
The company will use funds to develop and release a series of large trained models that will push the boundaries of technology-enabled creativity and imagination.
Haiper: Building a foundation model for visual content
Founded by Dr. Yishu Miao (CEO) and Dr. Ziyu Wang (CTO), Haiper is building a foundation model for visual content that allows anyone, even those without technical experience to generate high-quality video content.
To advance video-generative AI, companies need to scale models and data to understand the world’s physics.
Every frame of a video holds minute visual information, from light to motion and texture, and object interactions.
Once generative AI can intuitively replicate reality, it can create stunning and true-to-life content, such as a linen shirt moving in the wind or a splash of water.
The UK company’s team is training its perceptual foundation model with distributed data processing and model training infrastructure designed to be scaled up.
Haiper currently offers a text-to-video tool that allows users to input written prompts.
These prompts are then used to create short video content, ranging from practical and creative requests like a “scary video game avatar” to fun and thought-provoking prompts that can be shared on social media.
Haiper says users have full creative licence over the direction of the content, and can continually amend characters, objects, backgrounds, artistic styles, and more to have granular control over the final visual product.
Dr Yishu Miao, co-founder and CEO of Haiper, comments: “Our end goal is to build an AGI with full perceptual abilities, which has boundless potential to assist with creativity. Our visual foundation model will be a leap forward in AI’s ability to deeply understand the physics of the world and replicate the essence of reality in the videos it generates. Such advancements lay the groundwork for AI that can understand, embrace, and enhance human storytelling.”
“As the barrier between ideation and implementation lowers, Haiper’s powerful foundation model will give many in the industry the opportunity to develop stunning content and visualise their ideas in ways that were previously impossible. Our time in stealth was spent building up crucial distributed data processing and model training infrastructure, which we’re excited to use this funding to scale,” adds Miao.
The investor
Octopus is a multi-stage venture capital investor specialising in B2B software, bio, climate, consumer, deep tech, fintech, and health. Each year, the VC deploys more than £200M to help its portfolio companies scale at speed.
Rebecca Hunt, Partner at Octopus Ventures adds, “At Octopus, we look to back exceptionally talented founders who have a unique insight into a market and a strong technical edge. Only resilient, experienced teams can build cutting-edge products and solutions, and with Haiper this is no different. The deeply technical foundations of Haiper have enabled them to innovate and make breakthroughs at a pace we haven’t yet seen in the AI Video space; they are sure to become one of Europe’s big AI players. We look forward to continuing to back Yishu and Ziyu on their world-changing mission.”
