DiffuSpace Raises Hundreds of Millions, Largest dLLM Funding to Date
智东西 · wechat · 2026-10-09
Shenzhen-based Diffusion Intelligence (DiffuSpace) has closed two consecutive funding rounds totaling hundreds of millions of RMB, the largest ever for a diffusion language model (dLLM) company and its first disclosed raise. It was co-led by Matrix Partners China, Shunwei Capital and Legend Capital, with CAS Star, Huawei Hubble and Horizon Robotics participating; proceeds go to model training, vertical-scenario adaptation and infrastructure. The company is training a larger next-generation dLLM, to be released and open-sourced in October.
Founded in Shenzhen in 2026 by HKU NLP lab co-director Kong Lingpeng and his PhD students Gong Shansan and Ye Jiacheng, the team began dLLM research in 2022 and proposed DiffuSeq, pioneering diffusion for sequence-to-sequence text generation (published at ICLR 2023). Its 2025 Dream 7B was the first to fully surpass same-size autoregressive models and matched 671B DeepSeek-V3 on planning, with over 2.5 million Hugging Face downloads, spawning Dream-VL, Dream-VLA and DreamOn. dLLMs generate in parallel rather than token-by-token, suiting on-device agents; related papers in the first eight months of 2026 hit 2.4x all of 2025, with Google, Inception and Ant Group investing. DiffuSpace has partnered with agent-computing platform Acrab, claiming 5x faster on-device agent runs, targeting AI PCs, smart cars, robots and smart homes.
Related event: DiffuSpace Raises Record Funding for Diffusion Language Models(2 posts)→
More from Venture
- Agents are having their metaverse moment — but this one sticks, says Sokolin — LexSokolin · 2026-10-09
- None of your marketing matters if agents don't recommend your product — gethackteam · 2026-10-09
- Robotics IPOs in Hong Kong: 'still better than Solana memecoins' — LexSokolin · 2026-10-09
- Dev builds CRED: one search box for 100+ StatCan and Bank of Canada data series — RichardsonDx · 2026-10-09
- Sabi raises $50M to build the world's most wearable BCI cap, backed by ex-OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil — LexSokolin · 2026-10-09
- Inference Marketplaces Emerge as Intelligence Becomes a Commodity — metehan777 · 2026-10-09