Haiper, a London, UK-based video-generative AI platform building a foundation model for visual content, is coming out of stealth mode with $13.8M in seed funding.
The round, which brought total funding to $19.2M ahead of it raising a Series A round in 2024, was led by Octopus Ventures.
Founded in late 2021 by Dr Yishu Miao (CEO) and Dr Ziyu Wang (CTO), both with PhDs in Machine Learning from Oxford University and former Researchers at DeepMind, Haiper is a video-generative AI platform building a foundation model for publishers, studios and individuals. It enables everyone, even those without technical training and experience, to generate high-quality video content. Current tools include text-to-video, which enables users to input written prompts which then produce short video content, from practical, creative requests, such as a ‘scary video game avatar‘, to fun or thought-provoking prompts that can be shared on social media. Users have full creative licence over the direction of the content, and can continually amend characters, objects, backgrounds, artistic styles and more, to have granular control over the final visual product. Creators can also upload and animate their own images and photos in a variety of styles – from Anime to Lego – and bring them to life.
Over the next few months, Haiper will develop and release a series of large trained models that will enable creativity and imagination. They have partnered with several top academic labs from the likes of the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and Fashion Innovation Agency at London College of Fashion.
The company has expanded its team to 20 people, in London and in an office in Toronto.
Dr Wang was a key contributor to DeepMind programs AlphaStar and AlphaGo and also served as a Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain, while Dr Miao previously founded and led the London ML team building large language models (LLMs) for Global Trust & Safety at TikTok. The company’s co-founders have experience working alongside AI pioneers, including Geoffrey Hinton, Nando de Freitas (principal scientist of DeepMind), and Phil Blunsom – currently Chief Scientist at Cohere.
FinSMEs
05/03/2024