KOKONI (魔芯科技), a Hangzhou AI company that was selling consumer 3D printers two years ago, raised ¥500M (~$74M) in a Series A last month at a ¥4B (~$595M) valuation. With this round, KOKONI has raised close to ¥1B (~$149M) since January. Huawei’s Hubble fund, chipmaker SMIC’s fund, Lenovo Holdings and the government-backed venture funds of Shenzhen and Zhejiang are on the cap table. It builds MoWorld, a world model: software that simulates a physical space so that a robot or a self-driving system can train in it before it touches the real world.
Chen Tianrun (陈天润), born in 2000, is a Zhejiang University PhD student under Pan Yunhe (潘云鹤), a senior figure in Chinese AI research. He registered KOKONI in 2021 and the next year began selling a consumer 3D printer with an app that turned photos into printable models; kokoni.ltd still opens on the printer, its copyright notice stopped at 2024, and nobody has touched the old business since.
Then investors began pouring money into world models, AI that predicts how a scene will change, and Chen had something most model labs did not…