S

StepFun

Foundation Models

Chinese AI company building large language and multi-modal models.

Total funding—

Valuation$10B

Employees—

Founded2023

HeadquartersShanghai, China

StatusPrivate

Products

Selected offerings — the AI products recorded here, not the vendor's full catalogue.

• StepFun Open Platform Model API Sold on its own

  API access to StepFun's text, vision, speech and image models, with credit packages and enterprise plans.

• 阶跃AI (StepFun AI) Application Sold on its own

  StepFun's consumer AI assistant, available on the web and as Windows and macOS desktop clients, offering web search, knowledge-base Q&A, image creation, tool use and speech recognition.

• 阶跃星辰 AI Studio (StepFun AI Studio) Developer tool Sold on its own

  A browser-based workspace for building, testing and deploying AI applications on StepFun's models, with a playground, a showcase library of example apps and a personal asset library.

Inside StepFun Open Platform

• Step Plan API service Paid add-on to the parent

  A subscription service from the StepFun Open Platform that supplies a monthly Credit pool for calling StepFun's flagship models from third-party coding tools and agent clients such as Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Cline and Zed.

Inside 阶跃AI (StepFun AI)

• StepClaw AI agent Included with the parent

  A one-click cloud-deployed AI agent offered inside the 阶跃AI assistant that interprets instructions and carries out tasks autonomously.

Closest alternatives 2

OOpenAIPrivate · $852BStepFun's own GitHub README for its Step1X-Edit image-editing model explicitly benchmarks itself against OpenAI's GPT-4o.9 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeLarger scaleSourced competitorCreate images and videoCompareAAlphabet (Google)Public · $4.2TThe same Step1X-Edit README names Gemini 2 Flash as the other closed-source model it targets parity with. Gemini 2 Flash is accessed via Alphabet's Gemini API, and stepfun-open-platform and alphabet-gemini-api both carry generate-visual-media.12 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeLarger scaleSourced competitorCreate images and videoCompare

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How this list is ranked ↗

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larger scale (public).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeLarger scaleCompareOOpenEvidencePrivate · $12.2B阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and OpenEvidence do comparable work on search answers; same layer and the same scale band (late-stage private).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale bandCompareHCH CompanyPrivate · $220M raisedOverlaps on agent orchestration, model inference and workflow automation; similar scale (private).3 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareSStackBlitzPrivateStep Plan and Bolt.new do comparable work on agentic coding; both also serve buyers who need to code with an AI assistant; StackBlitz's scale not recorded; ships platform rather than the same layer.2 of 12 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareGGreptilePrivateStep Plan and TREX do comparable work on agentic coding; both also serve buyers who need to code with an AI assistant; Greptile's scale not recorded.1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareQQodoPrivate · $50M raisedStep Plan and Qodo: AI Code Review (VS Code) both serve buyers who need to code with an AI assistant; similar scale (private).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareEEmergentPrivate · $1.5BStep Plan and Emergent do comparable work on agentic coding; both also serve buyers who need to code with an AI assistant; smaller scale (private); ships platform rather than the same layer.2 of 12 capabilitiesDifferent layerSmaller scaleCompareYYou.comPrivate · $1.5B阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and You.com Answer API do comparable work on search answers; smaller scale (private).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeSmaller scaleCompareTMThinking Machines LabPrivate · $12BStep Plan and Tinker both serve buyers who need to serve a model in production; same layer and the same scale band (late-stage private).1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale bandCompareLLightOnPublic · $29.6M阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and LightOn Enterprise both serve buyers who need to draft and edit written content; smaller scale (public).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeSmaller scaleCompareCMComet MLPrivate · $70M raisedStep Plan and Agent Optimizer do comparable work on agentic coding; similar scale (private).1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareRSRosetta StoneAcquired阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and Rosetta Stone Sapphire do comparable work on speech to text; Rosetta Stone is acquired, with no independent scale.1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareAAnacondaPrivate阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and Anaconda Assistant do comparable work on code generation; both also serve buyers who need to code with an AI assistant; Anaconda's scale not recorded.1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareFForethoughtPrivate · $115M raised阶跃星辰 AI Studio (StepFun AI Studio) and Forethought Solve do comparable work on voice agent; both also serve buyers who need to create synthetic voice and audio; similar scale (private).2 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareSSemrushAcquired ($1.9B deal)阶跃AI (StepFun AI) and Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit do comparable work on search answers; Semrush is acquired, with no independent scale.1 of 12 capabilitiesShared product typeCompare

Closest alternatives are pairs a vendor page itself compares. Similar products are matched from what each product does; nothing in that group is asserted as a rivalry.

Sources

Valuation

News reporting · 9 May 2026

$2.5B round (the largest single funding round for a Chinese AI company) values StepFun at approximately $10B post-money, per sources familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. A later report (Digitimes, 2026-06-10) says StepFun is seeking a $12B valuation in its pending Hong Kong IPO -- an ask, not a priced round, so the closed $10B figure is used instead.

Employees

Checked — none published

Checked 2026-08-27 and no citable figure found. Four sweeps were run and all came back empty for this company: (1) its own /about, /about-us, /company, /careers, /jobs and /team pages, pattern-matched for a self-published headcount; (2) stockanalysis.com's private-company page, which footnotes each figure to its source; (3) its Forbes company profile, which states a headcount and the month it is as of; (4) a targeted web search. Everything the search returned was a LinkedIn-scraping aggregator, and those disagree with each other by wide margins and cite nothing, so they are not used here. The field is null rather than carrying the round guess it held before.

Founded

Wikipedia · 27 Aug 2026

Wikipedia infobox "founded" field, read 2026-08-27.

Open StepFun in the directory

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