US-blacklisted company iFlytek has set up a new corporate entity to expand into semiconductors and other artificial intelligence-related fields as part of efforts to bolster China’s broader tech self-sufficiency initiatives. The new entity, Shandong Yixun Information Technology, was incorporated last week with a registered capital of 50 million yuan (US$7.1 million), according to the latest information from Chinese corporate data provider Qichacha. The scope of this entity’s operations would...

DP Technology – the developer of a suite of AI tools used by researchers for work spanning drug design to battery development – has raised more than 800 million yuan (US$114 million) in Series C financing to expand research and development (R&D) and hire talent. The Beijing-based AI-for-Science (AI4S) start-up said on Wednesday that the round drew backing from a mix of state-linked and venture investors, including Fortune Venture Capital, Beijing Jingguorui Equity Investment Fund, Beijing...

ByteDance-owned Doubao remained mainland China’s top consumer artificial intelligence app in December, according to a report, as the country’s Big Tech companies continued to outpace emerging start-ups in this market. Doubao, a ChatGPT-like app, had 155 million weekly active users in the second week of December, according to data released on Tuesday by business intelligence service provider QuestMobile. It said that number was nearly double the 81.56 million total recorded by DeepSeek’s...

AgiBot, one of the fastest-growing robotics start-ups in China, has set its sights on exceeding 1 billion yuan (US$142 million) in revenue for 2025, as the industry accelerates the commercialisation and large-scale deployment of humanoid robots. AgiBot was expected to ship a total of 5,000 humanoid robots in 2025, chairman and CEO Deng Taihua said in a company event on Monday. AgiBot’s output and sales targets, which the start-up confirmed on Tuesday, were expected to maintain “multi-fold”...

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi on Tuesday rejected calls by a group of US lawmakers to add it to a Pentagon list of companies alleged to have links with China’s military, describing the move as baseless and reiterating its focus on the consumer market. The smartphone-to-vehicle giant said it was “not a Chinese military company nor affiliated with any Chinese military entities” and that it “has always been and continues to be a consumer product company”. “[Xiaomi] provides products and services for...

DingTalk, the workplace collaboration app developed by Alibaba Group Holding, has unveiled a dedicated operating system and new enterprise hardware as it steps up its push into AI agents amid an intensifying arms race among China’s tech giants. At an event in Hangzhou on Tuesday, the Alibaba unit launched Agent OS, an operating system designed specifically for AI agents, alongside DingTalk Real, a hardware suite that serves as a physical terminal for running those agents. Alibaba owns the South...

Short-video platform Kuaishou Technology reported a major cyberattack to the police after a breach on Monday evening allowed explicit content to flood high-traffic live rooms for more than an hour. Kuaishou’s live-streaming services were thrown into chaos at around 10pm when recommended feeds were inundated with explicit material, according to news website Sina. Viewership in some compromised rooms surged past 50,000 before the platform launched an emergency response. By 11.30pm, Kuaishou began...