Lab profileActive frontier lab
StepFun (阶跃星辰)
Multimodal-to-Device CrewTotem · Ascending steps
Known for: MSRA-heavy Shanghai lab; multimodal models and heavy training infrastructure, increasingly oriented toward on-device and edge deployment.
Shanghai foundation-model lab founded by ex-MSRA Chief Scientist Jiang Daxin (姜大昕). Densest MSRA-diaspora cluster. Yin Qi (印奇, Megvii co-founder) became chairman January 2026.
Founded
2023
Location
Shanghai
Step-1VStep-2 (1T MoE)Step-Video-T2VStep-AudioStep-3 (321B MoE)
Valuation
$10B
$10B reported IPO target valuation
Funding raised
$3.2B
>$3.2B cumulative disclosed/announced funding, plus earlier undisclosed rounds
Key people
Investors
Government backing
Shanghai SASAC / Municipal Gov (上海市国资委)Pudong New Area (浦东新区)
Models & API pricing
Rates are OpenRouter's listed prices (USD per 1M tokens), a convenient cross-provider benchmark. First-party / native API pricing in China can differ, sometimes materially. Source: OpenRouter, as of May 29, 2026. Compare them on the models page.
News & coverage
Notable recent updates, newest first.
ISR 1 hour
FundingMay 24, 2026
StepFun
StepFun raised over 30 billion yuan in May 2026 for R&D, computing power, and talent.