
Visual China Group
Building 204 East Zone/5th Floor, 2nd Floor, No. 10 Jiuxianqiao North Road, Beijing, Chaoyang District, 100015, China
Overview
Visual China Group (“VCG” or “the Group”) is a visual communications and new media business in China, and among the largest image licensing companies in the world. VCG owns and manages China’s largest premium digital visual content platform, and is the first destination of choice for creative and media professionals to purchase and manage such content in China. Through its online licensing and copyright distribution platform VCG.com, the Group offers products including still imagery, videos, music, multimedia and other digital content to approximately 15,000 advertisers, media outlets, businesses and other organizations in China. It also operates China’s largest and most popular branded online communities for designers and photographers. The Group further connects consumers and businesses with its capabilities in licensing and advertising across multiple sectors. Through Tungstar.com, the Group provides premium entertainment content and integrated marketing solutions to media agencies, advertisers, film-makers, producers and celebrities. Through a strategic entry into tourism, education and other sectors of high relevance to visual communications, the Group also leverages its core competence to capture the strong consumer demand for visual content. Founded in 2000, VCG was the first company in China to license image and distribute copyrights through propriety online platforms, and has grown into a well-recognized player in the industry. In 2014, VCG was listed on the main board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (000681.SZ) and commands one of the industry’s largest market capitalizations. The Group has over 600 employees, with subsidiaries in major cities in Greater China including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 1
- Active investors
- 1
Sector focus
- Commercial
- Content
- Digital Media
Investment portfolio
- Shengshu Technology
Participated · Series A · Feb 2026
Founded in March 2023, Shengshu Technology builds foundational or "world" models across three areas: multimodal generation, real-time interaction, and physical-world actions. Its Vidu Q model targets professional video and content production use cases in comics, advertising, e-commerce, and film. The Vidu S1 model enables voice-controlled video generation at 540P and 25FPS while running efficiently on consumer-grade graphics cards. In December 2025 the company open-sourced Motus, presented as a unified world model for perception, prediction, and action, and its Motubrain robot control model reached a 95.8% success rate on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark. The company announced a $500 million funding round to support continued model research and technological innovation.
- 500px
Led · Series B · Jul 2015
500px is a photo-sharing platform and marketplace that lets photographers post, share, and sell images to customers such as agencies, designers, corporate marketers, and creative campaign managers. The company hosts a catalog of roughly 55 million images from about 6 million community members. 500px plans to use new funding to build out product features and expand geographically, with a particular focus on entering the Greater China market via a joint venture and distribution partnership. The company has pursued commercialisation of user-generated visual content and competes with EyeEm, Getty, Flickr, and smaller marketplaces like PicFair. Over its history it has experienced operational setbacks, including an App Store removal over adult-content policy issues and the ouster of co-founder and former CEO Oleg Gutsol. To date 500px has raised $23 million in total financing. 500px is a Toronto-based photo-sharing service that has focused on enthusiasts and pro photographers. The company plans to build an online commercial marketplace to enable users to sell and license their photos, targeting a higher-priced tier ($250–$500 per photo). It also aims to pursue partnerships to distribute physical prints through lifestyle retailers. 500px has grown its user base from about 100,000 two years ago to roughly 2.5 million today and offers paid plans ($25/month and $75/month). Those paid plans contributed to nearly $1.3 million in revenue by the end of 2012, and the company expects to at least double that with the marketplace and additional premium features. 500px intends to triple its ~25-person team and open a Bay Area office for business development while keeping technical work in Toronto. 500px is a Toronto-based photo-sharing site focused on helping photographers reach larger audiences and sell prints. The service offers Digg-like Popular and Upcoming pages and maintains an editorial staff that curates Editor’s Choice and Fresh collections. The team migrated a LiveJournal-based photo community to the current site on Halloween 2009 and, after two years of bootstrapping, grew from 1,000 users in 2009 to over 85,000 (about 45,000 joined in the last three months). The site experienced 60% growth in the prior 30 days and attracted 2.5 million visits in the last month. 500px generates revenue through a $50 pro account with custom layouts and by enabling photographers to sell prints. Management plans to use new funding to hire more engineers and build a global platform.
Team
Amy Liang
Chief Executive Officer