The shoe has finally dropped.
According to The Information, the former head of Alibaba's Qwen...Lin JunyangThe AI lab it founded has completed its first round of financing, raising hundreds of millions of US dollars, with a post-investment valuation of approximately US$2 billion (approximately RMB 13.5 billion).
Gaorong Capital and Sequoia Capital China jointly led the investment, each contributing $100 million. Tencent also participated with a $20 million investment.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, Lin Junyang, who just completed this round of transactions, has already begun seeking to launch a new round of financing.
According to Qichacha, within just one month from May to June,Lin JunyangThe company has registered multiple corporate entities, including 100% owned Yuyong (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., 99% owned Shanghai Blag Technology Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Gewu Zhiyong Management Consulting Partnership, which is controlled through Blag Technology.
To be fair, these names are quite interesting.
BragIt sounds like a transliteration of Pragmatics, which also refers to linguistics.
Lin Junyang earned his undergraduate degree in English from the School of International Relations and his master's degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Peking University. A person who works on large-scale models doesn't name his company based on "XX Intelligence" or "XX Brain," but rather on his own linguistic foundation.
That's unique!
Lin Junyang resigns to start his own business
A month ago, The Information revealed that Lin Junyang, the former head of Alibaba's Qianwen, was seeking $2 billion in funding for his startup AI lab, and everyone has been waiting to see what happens next.
Now that the deal is finalized, Lin Junyang's prestigious reputation has been realized in the capital market, yielding a real return of 13.5 billion yuan.
A $2 billion valuation is almost unprecedented for a Chinese AI startup.
For reference, the former chief scientist of OpenAIIlya SutskeverSafe Superintelligence raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation within three months of its founding.CTO Mira MuratiThinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion in its first round of funding at a valuation of $10 billion.
Compared to its Silicon Valley counterparts, 13.5 billion is not expensive.
His specific entrepreneurial direction focuses on world models and embodied intelligence. While at Alibaba, he spearheaded the formation of a small team within Qianwen (a Chinese Q&A platform) dedicated to robots and embodied intelligence. Starting with unfinished work is quite reasonable.
After leaving, he published a long article titled "From Reasoning Thinking to Agentic Thinking," with the core statement being: the previous stage of AI competition made models more capable of thinking; the next stage will make models think in order to act. Looking back now, it seems more like a technological manifesto for his entrepreneurial direction.
In March of this year, Lin Junyang resigned from Alibaba, leaving a message on X saying "bye my beloved qwen".
Before that, he joined Alibaba DAMO Academy as a fresh graduate, starting with NLP in search and recommendation scenarios, participating in early multimodal projects such as M6, and becoming the technical lead of Tongyi Qianwen at the end of 2022, becoming one of Alibaba's youngest P10s.
In three years, Qwen has been transformed from an internal project into an open-source model family used by developers worldwide. With different sizes, multimodal models, and continuously updated code models, it can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and deployed, placing it in the top tier of global open-source AI models.
Lin Junyang deserves much credit.
The Information previously analyzed in an article the reasons why investors were chasing Lin Junyang—
His accomplishments at Alibaba were largely due to his achievements there.
One more thing
In this round of financing, Tencent invested $20 million. The amount isn't large, but the signal is clear.
DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Zhipu have all received funding from Tencent, and there are also reports that Tencent is participating in DeepSeek's funding round.
With the addition of Lin Junyang, Tencent has invested in almost all the top players in China's AI startup circle. With a base investment of 18 billion yuan in its self-developed Hunyuan AI platform and a wide-ranging external investment, a $20 million investment is simply an entry ticket for Tencent, securing a close observation position.
However, compared to the details of the financing, one small detail might better illustrate Lin Junyang's current situation.
Although I'm not sure if he changed it recently, I suddenly noticed that his profile picture has changed to a photo of him leisurely drinking tea, captioned ❤️🍵☕️
This is roughly what the feeling of receiving funding looks like.
Reference Links
[1]https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-tencent-backs-former-alibaba-researchers-new-ai-lab
[2]https://x.com/JustinLin610