AI Investment Surges as Chip and 3D Startups Hit New Milestones

The largest deal came from VAST, which announced recent completion of Series B and B+ rounds totaling approximately ¥3 billion, led by Matrix Partners China. Participants included strategic investors from gaming, marketing and technology sectors, while existing shareholders increased their stakes. With these rounds, VAST has raised about ¥5 billion within less than six months, setting a record for AI 3D companies. Alongside the financing, VAST released Tripo P2.0, which it called the first natively quad-topology 3D foundation model. The model generates clean, animatable and editable meshes in seconds, meeting industrial thresholds for game engines, binding and editing. VAST also presented its Project Eden world-model research, which decouples state simulation from visual rendering and can feed generated scenes into robotics simulators such as Nvidia Isaac Sim and Gazebo. Tripo has been embedded in production workflows including NetEase games, Bambu Lab's MakerWorld and partnerships with HeyGears, Creality and Elegoo.

In compute-in-memory, the pace has shifted to delivery. On Aug 24, Xiaomi released the Xuanjie O100 high-bandwidth AI accelerator, built on a 6nm process with 3D wafer-level stacking and 1.22 TB/s near-memory bandwidth. In mid-August, Qianhe Yibang closed a Series B of over ¥2 billion and lit up a 4-layer 3D DRAM stacked CIM chip. Haoze Technology released the VVT300 SoC for edge AI, planning mass production this year. In July, Dongfang Suanxin began volume delivery of the DF1000, a 14nm software-defined near-memory computing chip delivering 520 TFLOPS. These announcements followed a wave of funding and tape-outs that have made mass production and customer deployments the new benchmark.

Products have begun crossing that benchmark. Hounuo Intelligent's M50 digital CIM chip has been in mass production since February 2026, offering 160 TOPS at 10W and running large models from 30B to 122B parameters. It is used in Agent Computers, companion robots and edge servers, including Lenovo AI host P7 and Great Wall N90 Pro. Zhichun Technology's NOR Flash-based analog CIM chips have shipped over ten million units, embedded in smart wearables from Huawei and Xiaomi. According to IIM data, the global CIM market reached $4.87 billion in 2025, up more than 60% year-on-year, and is projected to grow to $31.25 billion by 2030. Digital CIM architectures accounted for 55.3% of the market in 2025, while analog CIM held 27.8%.

Violoop also disclosed a nine-figure yuan round in angel and Pre-A financing, with investors including Lenovo Capital, CICC Porsche, BlueRun Ventures, Genesis Capital, Qifu Capital and Zero2IPO Ventures, and Xiangyang Capital as financial advisor. The startup's first product is a desktop device that connects to an existing PC through HDMI and USB, allowing an AI agent to see the screen and operate keyboard and mouse. It uses multimodal long-term memory, workflow learning and personal post-training to turn a user's verified work experience into model parameters. With 26 TOPS of edge compute, it performs local inference and routes complex tasks to cloud models. Founder He Jialin said the goal is to let AI learn while working with its user, while keeping final control of irreversible operations with a physical confirmation button. Violoop said about 12,000 people worldwide have placed deposits, and the product is scheduled to launch in September.