StepFun

Profile Overview

StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a Chinese artificial intelligence startup founded in April 2023 by Dr. Jiang Daxin (姜大昕), former Vice President of Microsoft and General Manager of Microsoft's STCA AI platform division in China. Headquartered in Shanghai, StepFun has rapidly emerged as one of China's most promising foundation model companies. The company's flagship product is the Step series of large language models, including Step-1 and Step-2, which have demonstrated competitive performance on Chinese-language benchmarks, rivaling established models from Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. StepFun has also developed Step-1V, a multimodal version capable of understanding images alongside text, and has invested heavily in long-context reasoning capabilities. StepFun distinguishes itself through its technical approach to training efficiency, achieving strong benchmark results with comparatively fewer GPUs than competitors. The company's founding team includes AI researchers and engineers from Microsoft, Google, Baidu, and Alibaba. In December 2023, StepFun raised $100 million in a seed round led by Sinovation Ventures (founded by Kai-Fu Lee), with additional participation from Qiming Venture Partners and Matrix Partners China. A second funding round in mid-2024 raised an additional $200 million, bringing StepFun's valuation to approximately $1.5 billion. StepFun represents the dynamic new generation of Chinese AI entrepreneurs, combining deep research expertise from major global tech companies with ambition to compete at the highest tier of foundation model development.

Flagship Offerings

Vetted AI Models