AI image generation technology provider Tiamat has raised an additional A+ round investment, led by Linear Capital

36Kr has learned that Tiamat recently raised several million dollars in an A+ round, led by Linear Capital, with existing investors DCM and Oasis Capital following. VisionX Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round. This comes just three months after the company closed a nearly $10 million Series A in February — a quick second vote of confidence from investors that signals AI image generation is pulling ahead as the first AIGC category to hit the fast lane in China.

"AIGC technology is becoming a new form of visual content productivity, but generating content with high commercial value still presents many challenges," said Zeren Bai, Investment VP at Linear Capital. "What Tiamat is doing is precisely exploring and bridging that last mile for industrializing text-to-image technology, unlocking the massive commercial potential of generative AI." As 36Kr has previously reported, Tiamat is a domestic AI image generation technology provider founded in 2021. Its self-developed Morpher VLM is the first near-10-billion-parameter cross-modal generation model in China based on a concept fusion paradigm, improving the model's ability to model multi-scale image information and advancing its comprehension of user prompts. This year, Tiamat has focused on productizing its proprietary technology. Similar to Midjourney, the most popular AI art tool overseas, Tiamat started with a "community-as-a-service" model, continuously refining its model through community operations. The company has already launched a beta web product and earned strong user reviews in third-party benchmark comparisons. The image below shows an evaluation by UISDC, China's largest designer community, comparing several mainstream AI art tools at home and abroad, with Tiamat and Wenxin Yige representing domestic options.

Rewind to last winter, and AI art still felt more like a product of the mass-entertainment era. People happily generated illustrations, artworks, and cartoon portraits with various tools, showing high tolerance for this low-cost, near-effortless creation method. But by late March this year, as Midjourney V5 pushed photorealistic image generation to "photo-grade" quality, competition in the AI art space intensified dramatically. Today, users no longer question or marvel at AI's capabilities — instead, they've devised all sorts of deliberately tricky prompts designed to stump the technology.

In 2023, the key to breaking through in AI image generation has become: more balanced stylistic expression, faster iteration in semantic understanding, and thus improved controllability in AI output. In past 36Kr coverage, Tiamat's founding team emphasized their focus on controllability during R&D — that is, how to enable humans to better use and apply large models in ways that are manipulable and aligned with human expectations. This aligns not only with user needs but also with the B2B commercialization capabilities that have drawn broad attention in the domestic market.

On the commercialization front, Tiamat has already accumulated active SME clients across FMCG, advertising, fashion, and design. Starting from needs for customization or cross-industry collaboration, the company has gathered more vertical demand while gaining deeper insight into pain points in specific commercial scenarios.

Toolification is the critical step for any emerging technology to truly become productive force. And the purpose of product is to connect people with AI, organizing a warm, interactive dialogue.

Going forward, Tiamat will continue iterating its R&D capabilities and refining its product suite, participating in the domestic AI image generation field's evolution from "entertainment value" toward digital productivity.

PS: The cover image was generated by Tiamat.

About Linear Capital

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Linear Capital is an early-stage investment firm focused on "frontier technology + industry," covering frontier technologies such as data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics, and technological transformation in traditional sectors (such as biotech, materials, and energy), applied across vertical industries to dramatically improve efficiency, address pain points, and enable industrial upgrading — achieving outsized commercial returns through substantial industrial value creation. The firm currently manages ten funds with total AUM of approximately $2 billion.

We invest primarily from angel through Series A, typically leading rounds of $3–8 million or RMB equivalent.

Our early investments include Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, Agile Robots, and over 120 other startup teams. The combined valuation of Linear's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier Data Intelligence Technology Fund, with a long-term vision of building the most influential Frontier Technology Application Fund.