Tech giant Microsoft has hired a number of senior employees from AI video startup Haiper — including the company’s two cofounders.
Founded in 2021 by former Google DeepMind researchers Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang, London-based Haiper emerged from stealth last year with a $13.8m funding round backed by Octopus Ventures.
Seen as a European challenger to American video-generation tools like Runway AI and OpenAI’s Sora, Haiper’s consumer-facing product allowed users to quickly create videos through prompts entered into its app.
But in a move reminiscent of Microsoft’s mass recruitment of Inflection AI staff in 2024, Sifted has learned the Silicon Valley giant hired three senior employees who previously worked at Haiper, which shut down its consumer business in February, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Miao, Wang and ex-Haiper machine learning researcher Edward Hayes have joined Microsoft AI, where they will report to Nando de Freitas, the division’s VP of AI, who previously oversaw the team developing audio and image-generation tools at Google DeepMind.
Haiper’s office in King’s Cross has been left vacant, while the company’s 20 or so staff are pivoting towards a B2C model, a source familiar with the matter told Sifted.
Speaking at the time of Haiper’s funding round last spring, cofounder Miao said the company aimed to “build an AGI (artificial general intelligence) with full perceptual abilities, which has boundless potential to assist with creativity”.
According to Miao’s Linkedin profile, he served as CEO of Haiper until March 2025, before joining Microsoft AI as a member of technical staff. His profile reads: “After 3 years startup life with Haiper, I’m starting a new journey at Microsoft AI building multimodal generative AI!”
Sifted approached Microsoft for comment. Octopus Ventures declined to comment.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/microsoft-haiper-ai-hires-video-sora-inflection/
