Written by Hao Xin and Wu Xianzhi

Edited by Wang Pan

On June 19th, Jing Kun, the former CEO of Xiaodu, and Zhu Kaihua, the former CTO of Xiaodu, officially announced the latest progress of their startup, with their company "MainFunc" completing a $60 million seed round of financing led by BlueRun Ventures, valuing the company at $260 million post-investment.

We inquired about this issue with Zhu Tianyu, the managing partner of BlueRun Ventures, who responded by saying, "You can refer to the official information released by the company," without denying the authenticity of the above news.

Continuing with the configuration at Xiaodu, Jing Kun serves as the CEO and co-founder of the new company, while Zhu Kaihua serves as the CTO and co-founder. On June 19th, MainFunc launched a search product called "Genspark" that rivals Google and perplexity.

(Image Source: PitchBook)

With the advent of AI2.0 opportunities, it is not uncommon for executives from large companies to leave their positions and embark on a startup trend. However, the reason why Jing Kun and his longtime partner Zhu Kaihua have attracted attention is closely related to their past experiences. The former is known as the "father of Xiaoice" and once served as the chief architect of Baidu's search engine, while the latter specializes in basic search architecture and strategy modules, pioneering the DNN search ranking model. The combination of these two powerful individuals seems natural for creating a search product.

More importantly, before officially embarking on their entrepreneurial journey, they had already successfully built a Xiaodu with a valuation of tens of billions of yuan, which was once considered the "most successful project within Baidu." Last year, Xiaodu completed its B+ round of financing, and rumors about "Xiaodu's IPO" also surfaced occasionally. Perhaps because of this, BlueRun Ventures offered a "sky-high" valuation even at the seed round.

There are many details behind Jing Kun and Zhu Kaihua's entrepreneurship worth exploring:

Insiders revealed that "Jing Kun leaving Baidu almost emptied the entire Xiaodu," and such a "systematic" departure to start a business is not common, but seems quite common in the AI field, with the previous case being AI startup Jieyue Xingchen.

Last October, Jing Kun officially announced his departure from Xiaodu. In March this year, the new team applied for the MainFunc trademark, in April for the Genspark trademark, and in June announced the product and financing, spanning only eight months.

The first product, Genspark, functions as a "search + Wikipedia + shopping assistant" model, complementing the AI Agent DEMO demonstration at last year's Baidu World Conference.

Splashing $60 million, one of the investors, Zhu Tianyu, the current managing partner of BlueRun Ventures, previously served as a senior investment manager at Baidu.

In simple terms, it's a group of former Baidu employees getting together to recreate a "Baidu" overseas.

Old Partners Join Hands to Recreate "Baidu"

Photon Planet attempts to piece together the timeline of the entrepreneurship of the two former Baidu executives from the available information.

In October 2023, AI Technology Review reported that "the former CEO of Xiaodu Technology, Jing Kun, left his position and joined hands with the former CTO of Xiaodu, Zhu Kaihua, to start a business soon." At that time, given the business nature of Xiaodu, many people speculated that Jing Kun and Zhu Kaihua's entrepreneurial direction would be AI hardware. People may have forgotten that AI hardware is just a terminal, and what supports the "soul" of the terminal is actually a set of human-computer interaction based on search.

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