Liblib's Parent Company Completes Nearly $300M Series B+ Round at Over $2B Valuation
Miles Bennett
Evoken (演语科技) closed a nearly $300 million Series B+ at a valuation above $2 billion, setting a new funding record for China's AI-application sector. This means → China's creative-AI tool space has produced its first company whose annualized revenue rivals leading overseas peers.
How big is this round?
The round was co-led by Granite Asia, Tencent, and Shunwei Capital, with HT Investment and V Capital following. Existing backers Gaorong and Ant Group re-upped.
Company-wide ARR — annualized recurring revenue, the current monthly run-rate multiplied by 12 — has crossed $300 million. This means → Evoken now matches AI music tool Suno on revenue and runs at roughly 3× the ARR of AI avatar platform Heygen.
The prior Series B in October 2025 raised $130 million. Doubling the round size in barely six months is rare among Chinese AI startups.
What does this company actually do?
Evoken is the parent company behind three product lines — Liblib AI, Liblib TV, and Xingliu Agent — all organized around AI creative tools.
Liblib AI positions itself as one of China's largest AI-asset websites, with over 30 million registered users, more than 500,000 original models, and over 100 million professional image and video assets.
Liblib TV provides AI video-production capabilities for studios and film teams. Xingliu Agent is an AI design agent — an automated tool that handles the full workflow from concept to delivery — targeting China's designer community.
Who is behind Evoken?
Founder Chen Mian previously led global monetization for ByteDance's CapCut and Jianying, making him ByteDance's youngest manager at the 4-1 level.
Put simply = his job at ByteDance was turning creative tools into revenue businesses. That background shaped Evoken's intense focus on PMF — product-market fit, meaning the product genuinely matches what users need — and monetization.
His strategic choice: avoid competing head-on with Adobe in the "downstream editing" layer and instead own the "upstream creative" layer — carving out space between ByteDance's Jimeng and Jianying.
Why is the AI short-drama boom a key catalyst?
Data from China's Online Audiovisual Association: roughly 128,000 micro-dramas launched in Q1 this year, of which 122,000 were AI-generated — over 95% of the total.
This means → AI short dramas are no longer experimental; they are the dominant format, directly fueling demand for AI creative tools.
ByteDance's Hongguo short-drama platform and other distributors are actively subsidizing the AI-drama ecosystem, and Evoken, as an upstream tool provider, is riding that wave.
How large is the valuation gap with U.S. peers?
Suno reports the same $300 million ARR but carries a $5.4 billion valuation — 2.7× Evoken's.
Cursor hit roughly $2 billion in ARR by March; its SpaceX-linked transaction priced it at $60 billion.
In plain terms = at the same revenue scale, U.S. companies command far higher valuation multiples. This reflects a systemic gap between the Chinese and U.S. AI-application markets in PMF maturity, ecosystem depth, and capital attention — and that gap is exactly why this round is being read as "the right founder meeting the right tailwind."
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.