Beijing-based AI start-up ModelBest has concluded a C+ Series funding round, for a total of 5 billion yuan ($740m, £550m) raised so far this year, investors said, amid growing interest in tech that can run powerful AI tasks on devices such as smartphones and laptops.

ModelBest, a prominent player in on-device AI, completed the round last week, investor Shanghai Mejoy Capital said in a social media post.

Shanghai Mejoy said the round valued ModelBest at 20bn yuan, without disclosing the size of the latest funding round.

Currently some AI features run locally on devices such as phone handsets, but more compute-intensive tasks rely on routing chores through remote facilities, adding latency and costs and raising privacy questions.

While continuing to develop large models with trillions of parameters, companies are also developing models and techniques for running increasingly powerful tasks locally, known as local or edge AI.

In China, edge AI is seen as a way of taking advantage of locally produced AI chips that are better suited to training lighter-weight models than frontier products.

In May, ModelBest said its billion-parameter on-device MiniCPM5-1B model was trained entirely on Huawei’s Ascend chips.

It achieved top benchmark scores on Artificial Analysis’ index for open-weights under 2 billion parameters.

Shanghai-based StepFun, backed by Tencent Holdings, last week announced Step Edge, a family of on-device AI models offering low latency, local data processing and the ability to handle simple tasks without a network connection.

A day later, the company announced the StepX Neo, a smartphone designed around autonomous AI agents built to interpret complex user requests and carry out tasks independently, StepFun said. The company didn’t give a launch date or pricing.

Apple is similarly relying on third-party providers such as Google and OpenAI for high-end tasks, while also working on on-device models.

Last month, the company announced the 3 billion parameter AFM 3 Core and a more advanced 20 billion parameter model that activates between 1 and 4 billion parameter based on user tasks. Both are designed to run on devices.

Apple is also evaluating technology from Silicon Valley firm PrismML that claimed last week to have successfully run Alibaba’s 27 billion-parameter Qwen 3.6 model locally on an iPhone, CNBC reported.

Alibaba and Baidu are providing technology for Apple’s AI products in China, the companies said last week.