**Virtual human company Huiye Technology received tens of millions of RMB in Pre-A+ round financing, led by Hillhouse Ventures**
*Huiye Technology can provide solutions for “giving virtual human interaction and performance capabilities”.*
36æ°ª was informed that the virtual human company Huiye Technology completed the pre A+ round of financing of tens of millions of yuan led by Hillhouse Ventures and followed by Shunwei Capital. This round of funding will be used to continue refining the product, lowering the threshold for virtual content production, expanding the team, and developing more customers.
In January this year, Huiye Technology completed the Pre A round of financing exclusively invested by Shunwei Capital. Earlier, the company received an angel round of financing led by Tsingshan Capital.
Huiye Technology is a service provider of AI-driven technology for virtual life. They have created a “generative deep neural network framework”, based on which virtual characters can learn human movement patterns from simple to complex. Under the premise of not needing real-life motion capture, input a piece of music into the system, and the virtual character will automatically dance according to the melody. Founder Qu Siyuan calls it a solution that “empowers virtual humans to interact and perform.”
The traditional animation production mode requires professional animators and hardware and software, and the live action supplement mode also requires professional “people in the middle”, but AIGC (content generated by AI) can greatly reduce the threshold for creating virtual content.
â??Our target users are creators who donâ??t yet have the ability to create virtual content on their own. They can generate basic or complex 3D motion content through our product. For example, dance moves, all they need to do is input music into the system, You can get a virtual human dance performance.” Qu Siyuan said.
However, compared with traditional animation production and live action complementing, Qu Siyuan believes that AIGC (content generated through AI) is not a simple replacement for them. “In terms of efficiency, real people and AI are really not at the same level. AI can quickly generate 2,000 pieces of dance content with 2,000 songs, but it may take two or three years for real-life motion capture. It seems that AI has won, but professional animation The production itself requires manual artistic processing, and it is difficult for AI to generate such movements with artistic understanding, so the two cannot be compared purely from one dimension.â?
Now, Huiye Technology has opened the web version of AIGC tool for customers to test. In terms of business model, Huiye Technology hopes to provide to B services to enterprises that need to create virtual people. Qu Siyuan calls it AI being as a Service, and Huiye Technology will provide two modes of local privatization and cloud-native digital human. At the same time, Huiye Technology has also launched its own virtual human products, including digital human DJs, virtual fitness coaches and virtual brand spokespersons.
This year, Huiye Technology has expanded its technology stack according to the needs of customers, including AI-assisted modeling and automatic binding of AI, as well as visual effects processing of automatic mirror movements, and optimized the action of virtual models on the catwalk and virtual human display of goods. algorithm.
“In practical applications, we found that it is not enough to just make the virtual human move. At present, Huiye Technology cooperates with many leading customers to reduce demand and refine the process.” During the cooperation, they found that every time the virtual person showed a different pair of shoes, the rigger needed to bind the shoe model to the virtual person once. In order to improve efficiency, Huiye Technology has developed an automatic binding algorithm to solve this rigid demand.
â??In real storytelling, the creator has provided the creator with characters, lighting, and environments, and all you need to do is record with footage and edit later. But in virtual storytelling, there is no physical world. We need to start from the material Duan is the creator of the virtual world and builds content from scratch,” said Qu Siyuan.
After the production process is relatively mature, Huiye Technology plans to open it to some small and medium-sized studios and individual creators to assist their virtual content creation.
Among the team members of Huiye Technology are researchers from Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, ByteDance, Alibaba, and art creators from China Academy of Art, Tsinghua Academy of Art, and Hubei Academy of Art. At present, products and services of AI being as a service have been launched to Belle, BMW, Ant Financial, Starmaker and other customers.
The lead investor of this round, the project leader of Hillhouse Ventures, said that in the future, there will be a huge amount of virtual reality with infinite scenes, which requires strong 3D content generation technology as support, and the current content generation market has high technical barriers, Multiple challenges with high production costs and high barriers to entry. “Huiye Technology relies on precisely selected entry points, such as digital human ‘cerebellum’ actions to realize 3D content, and improves the automation of content generation through AIGC technology, which greatly reduces the production threshold. We believe that more and more content and scenes It will be quickly opened due to AIGC process technology, which will not only open up an incremental market for 3D content production, but also further expand the imagination space for the development of virtual reality.â?
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