Shanghai Jieyue Xingchen Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd, known as StepFun, is an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Shanghai, China. It has been dubbed one of China's 6 "AI Tiger" companies by investors.[1]
Background
StepFun was founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft employees.[2] Investors include Tencent, Qiming Venture Partners and Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment.[3]
In July 2025 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, StepFun announced the "Model-Chip Ecosystem Innovation Alliance" which consisted of Chinese developers of large language models (LLMs) and AI chip manufacturers. This included companies such as Huawei, Biren Technology, Moore Threads and Enflame.[4] Another second alliance named the "Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce AI Committee" was also established that included StepFun, SenseTime, MiniMax, MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX.[4]
On 25 February 2026, it was reported that StepFun was seeking an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.[5]
StepFun focuses on multimodal models which are designed to understand multiple types of input data such as text, video and audio.[6]
Products
In July 2024 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, StepFun officially launched Step-2, a trillion-parameter LLM, along with the Step-1.5V multimodal model and the Step-1X image generation model.[7]
In February 2025, StepFun and Geely jointly announced the open-sourcing of two multimodal large models to global developers. They were Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio.[8][9]
In July 2025, StepFun released Step 3.[10] The Model-Chip Ecosystem Innovation Alliance aimed to optimize Step 3 for domestic chips.[11]
In April 2025, Step-R1-V-Mini was released. It is a multimodal reasoning model designed for visual interpretation and image understanding.[6]
In February 2026, Step 3.5 Flash, a mixture-of-experts model with 196 billion parameters and 11 billion active parameters was released under the free and open-source Apache 2.0 license. It supports tool use and a 256k token context window.[12][13]
Models
| Name | Release date | License | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Step 3.5 Flash | February 2026 | Apache 2.0 | [12][14] |
| Step 3.7 Flash | May 2026 | Apache 2.0 | [15] |
See also
References
- ↑ "Meet the 'Six Tigers' that dominate China's AI industry". Quartz. 10 March 2025. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
- ↑ Chen, Wency (21 June 2024). "Shanghai AI start-up bets on 'scaling law' to overcome US chip ban". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ Jiang, Ben (26 December 2024). "Shanghai firm helps AI start-up Stepfun raise 'hundreds of millions of dollars'". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- 1 2 Mo, Liam (29 July 2025). "Chinese AI firms form alliances to build domestic ecosystem amid US curbs". Reuters.
- ↑ Fioretti, Julia (25 February 2026). "Tencent-Backed AI Startup StepFun Is Said to Plan Hong Kong IPO". Bloomberg News.
- 1 2 Jiang, Ben (12 May 2025). "China's StepFun aims to stand out in AI race with multimodal models". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ Chen, Wency (8 July 2024). "Chinese AI can benefit from bigger models, more data, says start-up founder". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ Xiao, Yisi (18 February 2025). "China's Geely and Stepfun Join Open-Source AI Trend With Two Models". Yicai Global. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ Berman, Noah (8 June 2025). "What is StepFun?". The Wire China. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ Zhang, Yushuo (29 July 2025). "USD2.3 Billion of Deals Are Inked at WAIC 2025 in Shanghai". Yicai Global. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- ↑ "Chinese AI chipmakers join forces with StepFun to counter Nvidia's return to China". TechNode. 29 July 2025. Retrieved 1 January 2026.
- 1 2 Jiang, Ben (3 February 2026). "Compact AI model from China's StepFun outshines rivals from DeepSeek, Moonshot". South China Morning Post. Archived from the original on 4 February 2026. Retrieved 14 April 2026.
- ↑ "Step 3.5 Flash: Fast Enough to Think. Reliable Enough to Act". static.stepfun.com. Retrieved 2 February 2026.
- ↑ "stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash". 14 March 2026. Retrieved 14 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
- ↑ "stepfun-ai/Step-3.7-Flash". 29 May 2026. Retrieved 2 June 2026 – via Hugging Face.
