Lei Jianping on January 11
Beijing Silicon Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Silicon Flow") completed an angel round of financing of 50 million yuan yesterday, led by Sinovation Works, followed by well-known figures in the science and technology industry such as Yaotu Capital, MiraclePlus and Wang Huiwen.
Founded in August 2023, Silicon-based Flow is committed to building AI infrastructure (AI Infra) in the era of large models, reducing the application cost and development threshold of large models, and accelerating the inclusiveness of AGI to mankind.
Silicon-based flow was founded by Dr. Jinhui Yuan (founder of Best-in-Class Technology and co-founder of Light-Year Away), and most of the current members are from first-class technology.
Lightyear Beyond is an AGI innovation company founded by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen. In April 2023, Lightyear completed the acquisition of first-class technology, holding about 4652% of the shares, Yuan Jinhui and Brilliant Partners hold about 3463% and 1884% interest, while Brilliant Partnership is owned by Yuan Jinhui and Zhao Zhen respectively 9442% and 558% interest.
However, in June 2023, Wang Huiwen left his post for medical treatment and recuperation due to physical reasons. Since then, Wang Huiwen's good brother, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, came to the rescue, and Meituan spent 206.5 billion yuan bought 100% of the shares of domestic and foreign entities outside the light year, which was a good story for a while.
Wang Huiwen "redeemed" the oneflow team
Before being acquired by Meituan, Wang Huiwen's holding company, AI Age, held 7672%, Wang Xing's Qimai holds 043%, and Hongshan China holds 244%, and other sellers hold 2041%。
The interests held by Ai Age, Qimai and Sequoia China (as co-investors) outside of the Offshore Lightyear refer to the shares they each subscribed for in the previous round of financing in May 2023.
As a result, the original acquisition costs for the interests of Qimai and Sequoia China (each as co-investors) outside of Lightyear were US$5 million and US$28 million, respectively. As Wong is the founder of Light-Year Away, there are no original acquisition costs incurred.
The total consideration of Meituan's acquisition consists of 3 parts:1. Approximately 2 in cash$3.4 billion; 2. Debt assumption 36.7 billion yuan (about 50.6 million U.S. dollars); 3. 1 yuan in cash.
The consideration for the offshore acquisition is 2US$3.4 billion (offshore consideration), including zero consideration to Ai AGE, US$5 million to Qimai, US$28 million to Sequoia China and US$200 million to other sellers.
As at the date of this announcement, the total net cash position of Lightyear Beyond (including Lightyear Beyond and Best-in-Class Technology) was approximately 2$8.5 billion. Upon completion of the Assignment Agreement (mutually conditional), Meituan holds 100% equity interest in Lightyear Group.
One of the concerns here is that the money from other investors who invested in other countries other than light-years was returned the same way, but Meituan paid zero consideration for AI Age, and the onshore buyer owed Wang Huiwen 1 yuan in face value.
After Meituan's acquisition of Lightyear, Yuan Jinhui's team restarted the business. This time, Yuan Jinhui explained this, saying that he often sees people misunderstand that Meituan can't afford its shareholders, and he only now understands the essence of all these transactions: Wang Huiwen redeemed oneflow.
Specifically, in addition to the acquisition of OneFlow 40 people, there are more than 30 new talents who have joined Lightyear, and most of these 30 people have joined Meituan.
Lao Wang (note: Wang Huiwen) spent more than 300 million yuan to buy 47% of the equity from Oneflow investors. The transaction announcement made it clear that Meituan purchased Lightyear (including 47% of Oneflow's equity) for one yuan, and Lightyear investors did not lose money or make money. Lao Wang really spent money, Lightyear and the team are shareholders of Oneflow, and at the same time, there is no competition with Oneflow. ”
Yuan Jinhui also pointed out: "The so-called redemption refers to Lao Wang's withdrawal of OneFlow investors through cash, so that the OneFlow team can do a large model business." ”
Silicon-based flow launched AI Infra commercialization solution
According to reports, with the explosion of ChatGPT and the rapid development of generative AI, the global demand for computing power has grown explosively, resulting in a serious shortage of computing power supply. The high cost of computing power and the threshold for application development have become the main bottlenecks in the development of generative AI.
The silicon-based mobility founded by Yuan Jinhui's team is committed to building AI infrastructure (AI Infra) in the era of large models, reducing the application cost and development threshold of large models.
Based on the deep accumulation in the field of AI infrastructure training and inference, as well as the technical ability to control the Vanka cluster, Silicon Flow has launched the AI Infra commercialization solution, which mainly includes three levels.
First, high-performance large model inference engines, including OneDiff and SiliconEngine.
OneDiff is an out-of-the-box high-performance Wensheng graph ** acceleration library, which supports the upper-layer mainstream application frameworks Diffusers, Comfyui, and SD-WebUI, and accelerates the performance of Wensheng Graph model SDXL by up to 3 times.
SiliconEngine is an efficient, easy-to-use, and scalable inference acceleration engine for large language models, which aims to provide users with out-of-the-box inference acceleration capabilities, significantly reduce deployment costs, and accelerate the implementation of generative AI applications. Through joint optimization at the operator, mechanism, framework, and model levels, SiliconEngine can achieve up to 10 times the performance of similar products in various large language model inference scenarios.
Second, the model service platform on the cloud mainly includes the MaaS (Model as a Service) platform ZeroCost and the high-performance computing platform PaaS (Platform as a Service).
ZeroCost aims to bring together high-quality models in various fields and accelerate them by a silicon-based mobile team, so that AI developers and users can develop and use models with zero threshold, and realize the rapid connection between application demanders and developer capabilities. The PaaS platform helps large model application enterprises run their generative applications in a simple, efficient, and scalable way.
Third, SiliconBrain, a one-stop AI application development platform, is a private deployment solution for AI application developers. Based on DevOps principles and practices that can improve workflow efficiency, SiliconBrain can achieve continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, helping to form a standard collaboration method for enterprise AI teams and realize the rapid implementation of enterprise AI applications.
At present, the large model inference scheme of silicon-based flow has been preliminarily promoted, and a number of overseas AIGC head companies have become the company's first batch of paying customers, while silicon-based flow is carrying out orderly cooperation with other large model enterprises and computing power companies.
Lei Di was founded by ** Lei Jianping, if ** please in**.