BorealisAI vs StepFun

Neither company has publicly disclosed a valuation, making a definitive size comparison difficult. BorealisAI employs 100-500 people, while StepFun has 100-500 employees.

StepFun has raised $200M in disclosed funding across 0 known rounds. BorealisAI's funding history is not publicly available.

StepFun holds the higher Awaira Score at 58/100, compared to BorealisAI's 55/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 3-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

BorealisAI was founded by Russ Salakhutdinov in 2018. StepFun was founded by Jiang Daxin in 2023. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

BorealisAI: Borealis AI is the AI research laboratory of Royal Bank of Canada, conducting fundamental and applied machine learning research with a focus on financial AI applications including time series forecasting, anomaly detection, natural language processing for financial documents, and AI fairness in credit and fraud decision systems. The Toronto-based lab collaborates with academic institutions and publishes research while developing AI capabilities deployed across RBC banking and capital markets operations.\n\nFully funded by Royal Bank of Canada, one of Canada largest financial institutions, Borealis AI operates without external investment, accessing the capital resources and data infrastructure of a tier-one bank for its research programmes. The lab has published extensively in top machine learning venues and developed open-source tools for temporal point processes and probabilistic forecasting that have been adopted by the broader research community.\n\nBorealis AI competes for talent with AI research labs including Vector Institute, Mila, and commercial labs from Google DeepMind and Meta AI that recruit from the same Canadian academic AI talent pool. The RBC affiliation provides access to real financial data at scale that academic labs cannot access, enabling research on problems including financial time series prediction and credit decision fairness that require production-scale data. The lab serves as both a research institution and a talent pipeline for RBC internal AI engineering teams building AI features across the bank retail, wealth management, and capital markets business lines. StepFun: StepFun develops multimodal foundation models for Chinese and English language applications, producing the Step series of large language and vision-language models that target enterprise deployment through API and private cloud licensing. The Beijing company was founded by Jiang Daxin, a former senior executive at Baidu, bringing search and large-scale AI infrastructure experience to foundation model development in the rapidly competitive Chinese LLM startup market.\n\nThe company raised approximately $200 million in early funding from Chinese venture capital firms including Hillhouse Capital and other technology-focused investors backing the wave of Chinese foundation model startups that emerged following the launch of ChatGPT. StepFun models are positioned for enterprise customers in finance, legal, and customer service sectors requiring high-quality Chinese language reasoning and instruction following capabilities.\n\nStepFun competes in a crowded Chinese foundation model market alongside Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Baichuan, as well as the AI divisions of Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance that have substantially greater compute resources and distribution. The Chinese foundation model market has seen aggressive fundraising and model release activity as the government signals support for domestic AI capability development. Differentiation among Chinese LLM startups is increasingly difficult as model benchmark performance converges, shifting competition toward vertical domain adaptation, inference cost, and enterprise integration services.

BorealisAI was founded first in 2018, giving it 5 years of additional market experience. StepFun was founded later in 2023. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Both BorealisAI and StepFun report similar employee counts of approximately 100-500. Team size is often a proxy for operational scale, though lean AI companies can punch well above their headcount.

Yes, BorealisAI and StepFun are direct competitors — both operate in the Foundation Models space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.