Ant Group invests in writing assistant start-up Mita as Chinese tech firms keep betting on AI

Launched earlier this year, Mita’s AI-powered search engine Metaso has accumulated 25.15 million visits and recorded 7.68 million visits in July

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Published: 8:00pm, 9 Aug 2024

Ant Group has led a new round of investment in a low-profile Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up with a focus on search engines and writing assistance, marking the fintech giant’s latest move in this field.

Shanghai Mita Network Technology raised over 100 million yuan (US$13.9 million) in a new funding round led by Ant Group, an affiliate of South China Morning Post owner Alibaba Group Holding, according to a report published by local media Latepost on Thursday. That put the six-year-old AI company’s value at around US$150 million.

Chinese internet firm Cheetah Mobile, US venture capital firm Amino Capital and Beijing-based Future Capital were involved in Mita’s angel funding and pre-A round financing in 2018 and 2021, respectively, according to corporate database platform Qichacha.

Mita was founded in 2018 by Min Kerui, who graduated from Oxford University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Master’s degree in mathematics and a PhD in computer science.

China’s AI sector has scrambled to offer a local answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT since the US start-up triggered the generative AI boom in late 2022. Photo: Shutterstock Images

Based in Shanghai, Mita last year developed its own LLM - the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT - called MetaLLM large language model (LLM), and launched four main applications covering sectors including web search and writing assistance, according to the company’s website.