AIGC Startup "Tiamat" Raises Another Eight-Figure RMB in Series A+ Round | Oasis Capital Vitality

Tiamat has recently secured several million dollars in an A+ round led by Linear Capital, with existing investors DCM and Oasis Capital following on. Farsighted Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round. This comes just three months after the company closed its nearly $10 million Series A in February — a clear sign that AI image generation is quickly becoming the first AIGC segment to hit the fast lane in China.

Founded in 2021, Tiamat is a domestic AI image generation technology provider. Its self-developed Morpher VLM is China's first near-10-billion-parameter cross-modal generative model built on a concept-fusion paradigm, which improves the model's ability to model multi-scale image information and advances 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 feedback in third-party benchmark comparisons. The image below shows a review 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.

Flash back 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's V5 update brought photorealistic image generation to life, competition in the AI art space intensified dramatically. Today, users no longer question or marvel at AI's capabilities — instead, they're inventing deliberately tricky, semantically ambiguous prompts to challenge the technology.

In 2023, breaking through in AI image generation hinges on two factors: more balanced stylistic expression and faster iteration on semantic understanding, both serving to improve the controllability of AI outputs. Tiamat's founding team has prioritized controllability throughout R&D — that is, enabling humans to steer and shape large models in ways that align with human expectations. This not only matches user demands but also connects directly to the B2B commercialization potential that the domestic market broadly cares about.

On the commercialization front, Tiamat has already built an active base of small and medium-sized enterprise clients across FMCG, advertising, fashion, and design. By addressing needs for customization and cross-industry collaboration, the company gathers more vertical demand while gaining deeper insight into pain points in specific business scenarios.

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

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

Source: 36Kr

Oasis Capital is a new-generation Chinese venture capital firm dedicated to discovering the most vital entrepreneurs of the coming decade and growing alongside them to create long-term value. "Nurturing vitality" is Oasis Capital's vision and mission. This vitality represents both the direction of structural transformation in the era and the resilience and evolutionary drive of entrepreneurs.

Oasis Capital focuses on early and growth-stage investments, deploying $3 million to $30 million per deal, with emphasis on robotics, artificial intelligence, and technology services — supporting China's technology-driven new service upgrade.