Consumer Daily - Jinzhao News

On June 15th, market sources revealed that the AI lab established by Lin Junyang, the former head of Alibaba’s QianWen large model project, has successfully completed its first round of financing. The round raised hundreds of millions of dollars, with the post-investment valuation reaching $2 billion (approximately RMB 13.514 billion). Insiders disclosed that this financing was led by Gaorong Capital and Sequoia China, each contributing $100 million (approximately RMB 675 million), while Tencent invested $20 million (approximately RMB 135 million). These sources also noted that following this transaction, Lin Junyang’s startup is already exploring opportunities for a new round of financing.

Lin Junyang (Reference Photo)

Public records show that Lin Junyang, born in 1993, holds a bachelor’s degree from the English Department of the University of International Relations and a master’s degree from Peking University’s School of Foreign Languages. His interdisciplinary academic background has provided him with a distinct edge in researching and developing large-scale model semantic understanding and multimodal fusion.

After earning his master’s degree in 2019, Lin Junyang joined Alibaba’s DAMO Academy Intelligent Computing Lab as a senior algorithm engineer. He quickly became involved in the M6 multimodal pre-training project, serving as a core developer and playing a pivotal role in the model’s early architectural design and technological advancements. This experience proved instrumental in Alibaba’s multimodal AI research and development.

In late 2022, Alibaba consolidated relevant teams to form the Tongyi Lab, with Lin Junyang officially taking charge as the technical leader for the Tongyi QianWen series of large models.

In 2024, Lin Junyang led his team in open-sourcing the Qwen series of models, establishing one of China’s most influential open-source large model ecosystems. Simultaneously, his leadership in technological innovations—such as the One-For-All integrated pre-training framework and the Chinese CLIP visual-text matching model—achieved world-class standards in areas like text-to-image generation and multimodal understanding. These advancements helped Alibaba’s M6 model become the world’s first multimodal large model with ten trillion parameters.

In May 2025, Lin Junyang was promoted to Alibaba’s youngest P10-level technical expert—the highest rank in Alibaba’s technical hierarchy, equivalent to a vice president. Achieving this milestone just six years after graduating, he became one of Alibaba’s fastest-rising technical leaders.

Alibaba QianWen Qwen (Reference Photo)

In March 2026, Lin Junyang publicly announced his resignation on social media. According to multiple media reports, he officially embarked on his entrepreneurial journey in May, focusing on world models and embodied intelligence. He recruited team members with experience at ByteDance, Tencent, and international companies, initiating financing at a valuation of approximately $2 billion (around RMB 13.6 billion) and engaging with investors such as Sequoia China and Gaorong Capital. Notably, in recent years, many core AI talents from China’s leading internet and tech companies have left to start their own ventures.

In 2023, Yang Zhilin, a former key AI researcher at ByteDance, founded Yuezhi Anmian and launched the Kimi large model, quickly positioning his team among China’s top large model developers.

In 2024, Jing Kun, former vice president at Baidu, left to enter the AI agent sector, focusing on next-generation AI application products.

In 2025, embodied intelligence emerged as a popular entrepreneurial field, with Chen Yilun, Huawei’s autonomous driving leader, founding Tashi Zhihang and securing substantial angel funding.

As 2026 began, AI technical leaders from automakers like Li Auto and XPENG also left to launch startups focused on consumer-grade intelligent robots and in-car AI. Overall, these entrepreneurs from major companies bring mature technological expertise and industry resources, with their projects generally receiving support from top-tier investors. This trend continues to drive rapid innovation in China’s large model, AI agent, and embodied intelligence sectors.

Source: Consumer Daily

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