Philo AI raises $10M seed to build interactive "world life model"

What's the deal? Philo AI, a Chinese AI startup founded in 2026, has raised close to $10 million in its first funding round. Vertex VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → was the sole investor.

What's the endgame? The company is building what it calls a "world life model." Rather than generating video files, it aims to enable real-time, two-way interaction between people and video characters.

Who's behind it? Philo AI is led by Zhang Jiasheng, a Tsinghua University PhD and a former member of HuaweiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s "Genius Youth" recruitment program.

The signal: A single-investor early round backing a research-led team points to investor appetite for interactive AI models over one-off video generation — a bet on what comes after today's text-to-video tools.

Read more: ITjuzi

Image credit: Generated with Gemini