Sigh! AIGC is in the ascendant, but the former leading unicorn in the domestic AIGC field is standing on the edge of a precarious cliff.
Moviebook Technology , the first AIGC star company, has been exposed to the dilemma of poor management and shutdown .
Founded in 2009, this AI imaging company has been focusing on the large entertainment industry. It once set a record for a single round of financing for AI imaging production with an amount of 1.36 billion yuan in the D round of financing.
With the blessing of heavy financing, in 2020, Moviebook will be valued at over 10 billion yuan, ranking 32nd in the "2020 Hurun Global Unicorn List".
In the industry, Movie Book became popular with a Korean drama:
In 2016, Moviebook successfully placed domestic beverage advertisements in the hit Korean drama "Descendants of the Sun" without any trace.
In the future, many films, dramas, and dramas, such as "The Legend of Chu Qiao", "Happy Camp", "Chinese Restaurant", "I Am a Singer", "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves", etc., which are well-known to the audience, have been filmed. Spectrum contracted.
More than that, Jingdong, Mengniu, Sanyuan, Mercedes-Benz, etc. were all customers of Movie Book.
What is the unicorn facing the limelight in the past?
Core employees broke the news about the operational crisis
Qubit learned from the core employees of Moviebook Technology that Moviebook has cut off the social security and provident fund contributions of the company's employees . Not only that, the company has also repeatedly delayed the payment of wages for many employees .
Faced with this situation, many employees of the company resigned and left, especially the financial and HR posts, and the departmental offices were almost empty .
In this troubled time, the employees of Moviebook also reported that the company's unified mailbox has been unable to log in.
It caused panic internally, and the external business almost collapsed.
According to news from the market, Moviebook has reached a strategic cooperation with Mango TV since 2016, and the related business has been taken over by other companies recently.
In response to the above news, Qubit sought official confirmation from Movie Spectrum, but did not receive a response as of press time.
Searching for relevant news about this company since this year, the latest industrial and commercial information occurred at the end of May. Qichacha shows that Xu Bing, the co-founder of SenseTime, has withdrawn from the company's "directors (directors), managers, and supervisors."
According to public information, Moviebook Technology was founded in 2009.
The core business is to automatically generate images with AI , mainly focusing on the research and development of image technology and computer graphics in the entertainment industry.
In layman's terms, the most well-known business of movie books is the kind of "secretly" implanting advertisements in film and television dramas and variety shows through generative AI technology, so that they will not be discovered by sharp-eyed audiences.
In the fourth year since its founding, Moviebook completed the angel round of financing.
The angel round investor said that from the signing of the agreement before the Spring Festival in 2013 to 2016, in three and a half years, "From the perspective of valuation, we have gained nearly 300 times the appreciation."
In the following five years, Moviebook Technology’s financing rounds came to the D+ round, and in the D round, it set a single-round financing record for AI image production with an amount of 1.36 billion yuan. This round was led by SenseTime, and the rest of the investors were There are CICC, Softbank, Ge Weidong, etc.
In the following years, five strategic financings entered the market one after another, almost each amounting to hundreds of millions of RMB.
The last public financing time is fixed in 2021.
According to public information, (at least) until 2020, the unicorn of Movie Book is still in full swing——
This year, the "2020 Hurun Global Unicorn List" was released, and a total of 586 unlisted companies established after 2000 with a value of more than US$1 billion were selected, including 21 AI industry unicorns.
Moviebook ranks 32nd in the world with a valuation of over RMB 10 billion . This is also the only company on the list that focused on AI image generation technology that year.
But in the fall of 2021, the company's actions have not been smooth sailing.
First, it applied for delisting from the New Third Board, and then terminated the listing counseling on the Science and Technology Innovation Board because of "consideration of development strategy and capital operation path".
Even so, when ChatGPT suddenly appeared at the end of last year and generative AI was brought to the fore, Moviebook Technology, which has been deeply involved in generative AI for many years, still attracted countless attention, and its name was mentioned many times in the inventory.
Run after the first year, but may fall in the first year of the large model
It was a product called "Implant Easy" under the company that made Moviebook vertically and horizontally in the field of AI film and television.
This product can search for advertising opportunities in the screen space of long and short videos, and then use generative AI technology to combine posters, logo projections, etc. It exists during the video shooting stage.
The core technology of this product is the "real-time cloud window implantation" of Moviebook , which uses cloud computing, online rendering, and then generates realistic floating windows. From this perspective, Moviebook is undoubtedly the first AIGC company in China.
When "Descendants of the Sun" was broadcast on the iQiyi platform, Yingpu became famous with this technology, and then quickly reached a strategic partnership with Mango TV, undertaking the implantation business of many film and television series of Mango TV in the past 6 or 7 years .
At this stage, the core product of Moviebook was renamed "Yi Zhi", which was once called "the standard product of Mango TV" by the staff of Mango TV Advertising and Marketing Center , and "very popular with customers".
Because of its long-term cooperation with many entertainment companies, Movie Book is also considered to be one of the most successful representatives of domestic AI technology commercialization in entertainment.
But Moviebook's ambitions obviously did not stop at this business.
Qubit sorted out the public information and found that although the concept of "generative AI" runs through the establishment and development of Moviebook, every year, Moviebook is telling new stories .
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2016
At the beginning of 2016, cooperated with Mango TV to launch the product "Yizhi".
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2018, the first year of VR/AR
In 2018, Moviebook set its sights on the VR and AR industries.
In 2018, known as the first year of AR/VR, Moviebook and SenseTime signed a strategic cooperation agreement, expressing cooperation in underlying AI technologies such as VR and video analysis.
Later, Moviebook also joined the China VR Core Technology Industry Alliance.
However, the story of Moviebook in the field of VR and AR has not been as successful as the advertising placement business.
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In 2019, AGC
So, in 2019, Moviebook focused on the Automatic Generated Content mode.
Automatic Generated Content, that is, AGC after PGC and UGC.
What Moviebook is doing on this track is to release MAPE, the machine-automated production video content engine, hoping to use AI technology to bring about changes in video production technology.
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2021, the first year of the Metaverse
By 2021, the Metaverse will be hot, and Movie Book will naturally not stop chasing the wave.
The company positions itself as a participant in the "automatically generated multimodal content metaverse", and is among the "first in China".
Indeed, at the beginning of 2022, Movie Book appeared on the TOP list of metaverse-related companies selected by some institutions.
In WAIC2022 in the middle of the year, the booth of Movie Book was almost completely arranged around the elements of the "Metaverse". At the same time, the ADT Meta version engine was released at the meeting, which is used to "build the technical core of the intelligent visual content production of the Metaverse".
And Moviebook's enthusiasm for the Metaverse has not been overshadowed by the popularity of the big model.
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2022, the first year of AIGC
However, with the huge wave of AIGC set off by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc., the metaverse stories of Movie Book have also begun to emphasize AIGC elements.
The "Shadow Universe" released by Movie Book is a metaverse activity platform that relies on AIGC technology and has technical capabilities such as XR and digital twins. This platform also supported the holding of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Conference this year.
On the whole, including VR/AR and Metaverse, Moviebook Technology has never let itself miss any popular AI concept in recent years.
However, the concept of "generative AI" has been accompanied all the way, and it will completely misfire on the most popular AIGC track in 2023.
Not only did he fail to show his talents as expected by the outside world, but was exposed to business difficulties and wage arrears.
It is a pity that such a AIGC unicorn in the past, which ran after the first year, may fall in the first year of AIGC's large-scale model competition.