Source: ByteOrigin

Last week, two significant developments unfolded almost concurrently. Firstly, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance who stepped down as CEO four years ago, made a "return" to Beijing. Secondly, Unitree Technology announced its Series C funding round.

These two seemingly unrelated pieces of news share a common thread through a fund company: Jinqiu Fund, a leading investor in Unitree Technology's current funding round.

Jinqiu Fund has deep ties with Zhang Yiming and ByteDance. Established in March 2022 by Yang Jie, former head of financial investment at ByteDance, its core founding team primarily comprises members from ByteDance's investment system and top-tier investment institutions.

More importantly, Zhang Yiming has always been avidly focused on technology. In Singapore, he interacts extensively with researchers and regularly visits China to engage with technical leaders. His emphasis on general artificial intelligence (AI) has reached strategic levels. As a representative of the domestic robotics industry, Unitree Technology also views AI as a strategic focus, with its executives consistently highlighting the importance of general AI in crucial settings.

Jinqiu Fund serves as a vital link between ByteDance and Unitree Technology, extending ByteDance's reach into terminal robots.

01

Zhang Yiming's "Connection"

The day before Zhang Yiming's return, market news reported that Unitree Technology had completed its Series C funding round, initiated at the end of last year. The round was led by funds from China Mobile, Tencent, Jinqiu Fund, Alibaba, Ant Group, and Geely Capital, with the majority of existing shareholders participating. In response, Unitree Technology stated, "We have indeed completed the Series C funding round recently."

Jinqiu Fund, to some extent, represents Zhang Yiming and ByteDance's stance towards Unitree Technology.

From the fund's name, Jinqiu Fund has a strong connection with Zhang Yiming and ByteDance. "Jinqiu" stems from Beijing Jinqiu Homeland, the birthplace of ByteDance. This name carries Zhang Yiming's early entrepreneurial memories and embodies his close bond with ByteDance.

From a financial perspective, although Jinqiu Fund is registered as an independent private equity fund, and its registration information does not directly reflect ByteDance's investment, multiple insiders have revealed that ByteDance and Zhang Yiming are significant financial supporters. This support not only aligns with ByteDance's investment layout in strategic areas like AI and overseas expansion but also reflects Zhang Yiming's personal homage to his early entrepreneurial spirit.

In terms of investment direction, Jinqiu Fund is highly aligned with ByteDance's strategy. It focuses on AI and overseas expansion sectors, leading investments in companies like the Indonesian e-commerce service provider Jet Commerce, embodied intelligent robotics company Lexiang Intelligence, and AI robotics enterprise Xingchen Intelligence. These areas complement ByteDance's global footprint and technological ecosystem construction. Furthermore, Jinqiu Fund and ByteDance's cloud service platform Volcano Engine have jointly launched an AI startup competition, further enhancing the integration of industrial resources.

Even though ByteDance's strategic investment department was dismantled in early 2022, Jinqiu Fund has, to some extent, inherited its investment logic. The founding team not only continues ByteDance's investment methodology but also fosters business synergies between some invested companies (like Syrius Robotics) and ByteDance's previous investments. Notably, Yang Jie, who led ByteDance's financial investments before joining Jinqiu Fund, has a team background and investment style consistent with ByteDance's strategic thinking.

In summary, Jinqiu Fund can be viewed as an extension of ByteDance's investment ecosystem. It not only encapsulates Zhang Yiming's emotional ties to his entrepreneurial origins but also perpetuates ByteDance's strategic layout in the technology field through market-oriented operations, serving as a crucial bridge connecting ByteDance's industrial resources with external innovations.

02

Commitment to AI

In his 2023 open letter, Zhang Yiming explicitly stated that the emergence of ChatGPT made him realize that "ByteDance cannot afford to miss AGI" and elevated it to a strategic level to "address the challenge of the organization's second curve growth".

Despite stepping down as CEO, Zhang Yiming remains deeply engaged in the research and development of general AI.

For a long time, Zhang Yiming has regularly attended the core technology review meetings of the Seed team, personally delving into OpenAI papers late into the night, and exchanging ideas with top AI researchers. In Singapore, ByteDance maintains a dedicated research team assisting Zhang Yiming in understanding cutting-edge technologies and discussing research plans, one of whom is Feng Jiashi, a former professor at the National University of Singapore and current ByteDance researcher. Since 2023, he has frequently provided guidance to Zhang Yiming.

Simultaneously, Zhang Yiming also functions as a "headhunter," personally overseeing the recruitment of AI talent from competitors and promoting the Doubao team to launch the "Top Seed Talent Program" to attract Ph.D. graduates with top-tier global compensation. He also pushed ByteDance to invest 40 billion yuan in purchasing AI chips by 2025 and spent 6.8 billion dollars building data centers overseas to ensure computational support for AGI research and development.

Within ByteDance, a unique organizational ecosystem has been cultivated for the research of general AI.

The Seed team is responsible for the iteration of large productized models, while Seed Edge focuses on fundamental research in general AI. The latter adopts a "long-term assessment + achievement compensation" mechanism, enabling researchers to tackle high-risk topics. Joint laboratories have been established with nearly 20 universities, including Tsinghua AIR and Peking University, to explore cutting-edge fields such as multimodal learning and world modeling. For instance, the VideoWorld model, developed in collaboration with Beijing Jiaotong University, has achieved unsupervised video understanding and robot task execution.

Unitree Technology is an even more ardent believer in general AI. "General AI refers to AI's ability to fully mimic human intelligent behavior, such as self-learning, self-improvement, and self-adjustment. Currently, this concept is predominantly found in science fiction works," said Wang Qixin, a director at Unitree Technology. In his view, embodied intelligence is a comprehensive concept that integrates bodily perception, environmental interaction, and motor ability.

"It underscores the significance of the body in intelligent behavior, necessitating an intelligent agent that perceives the surrounding environment through the body, gathers environmental information, and then makes decisions and adjustments to further interact with the environment for learning," Wang Qixin admitted.

Even without considering the influence of Zhang Yiming and ByteDance, Jinqiu Fund's investment logic and Unitree Technology's technical path resonate significantly. Unitree Technology's latest generation of humanoid robot B1 achieves motion control latency within 20ms and has developed an open semantic navigation system through the Visual Language Model (VLM), capable of understanding natural language instructions.

This technological breakthrough aligns with Jinqiu Fund's layout in the AI field (such as investing in AI content platform Zaomeng Ciyuan and initiating AI startup competitions), particularly in terms of commercialization in scenarios like household services and industrial inspections.

03

Redefining ByteDance's AI Strategy

Jinqiu Fund's move gives ByteDance a head start in the future large model competition to some extent.

Through the synergy of "large model + robot + content ecosystem," ByteDance constructs a full-chain AI capability from perception to decision-making, infusing "active intelligence" into products like Douyin and TikTok. It leverages general AI technology to reshape the competitive landscape in areas such as cross-border e-commerce and digital content. For example, the collaboration between Unitree's logistics robots and TikTok Shop may redefine cross-border logistics efficiency standards.

Unitree Technology's Unitree G1 humanoid robot, launched in February this year, boasts natural language interaction capabilities, while the UltraMem sparse model architecture released by ByteDance's Doubao team during the same period can reduce inference costs by 83% and enhance interaction efficiency. The coincidence of these technological timelines suggests potential implicit cooperation between the two parties in algorithm optimization.

It's worth noting that before DeepSeek gained widespread attention, ByteDance-affiliated products dominated domestic AI discourse.

As of the end of November 2024, Doubao APP's cumulative user base in 2024 had successfully surpassed 160 million. Additionally, Doubao APP had an average of 800,000 new users downloading it daily in November, with a DAU (daily active user count) of nearly 9 million, representing a growth rate of over 15%, far ahead of the domestic second-place Kimi's DAU of 3 million.

On January 27, the day of the Chinese New Year's Eve, DeepSeek simultaneously topped the free APP download rankings in both the Apple App Store in China and the United States, directly altering the narrative logic of the entire industry. Doubao's long-time rival Tencent Yuanbao chose to abandon its "soul" and directly integrate with DeepSeek. On February 13, Tencent Yuanbao officially announced the integration of the full-featured DeepSeek-R1 version and opened it to users.

Subsequently, with its aggressive investment strategy, Tencent Yuanbao gained momentum, temporarily surpassing all competitors at one point. On the evening of March 3, Tencent Yuanbao temporarily outranked DeepSeek's "original version" to top the free chart in the Chinese App Store.

AppGrowing data shows that in the first quarter of this year, technology giants and star startups spent a total of approximately 1.84 billion yuan on AI product advertising. Among them, Yuanbao's advertising expenditure amounted to 1.426 billion yuan, ten times that of Doubao's 138 million yuan.

"In the fields of large models and AI, there is indeed fierce competition, and we need to revert to normal business logic," said Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, who was still advocating for the industry to avoid "cutthroat competition" last September. However, in the face of DeepSeek's popularity, Tencent became the most aggressive player in spending money.

Amidst the competition for large model traffic triggered by DeepSeek, ByteDance needs to redirect its focus towards B-end scenario implementation. The emergence of Unitree Technology offers the potential for exploring such scenarios. For instance, the logistics robot project between Unitree and Geely is scheduled for mass production in 2026. When connected to Volcano Engine's edge computing nodes, it can achieve millisecond-level response for "order instructions - path planning - cargo sorting" in cross-border warehousing, directly optimizing TikTok Shop's logistics efficiency.

It's worth mentioning that Jinqiu Fund's investment portfolio has formed an "AI + robot" ecosystem matrix. Its lead investment in Indonesian e-commerce company Jet Commerce can foster cross-border logistics synergy with TikTok Shop, and its investment in Xingchen Intelligence focuses on AI robot vision algorithms. These three companies, along with ByteDance's Volcano Engine and Doubao large model, form a triangular support of "scenario - algorithm - hardware".

Zhang Yiming's investment in Unitree Technology through Jinqiu Fund is essentially a forward-looking layout for the trend that "AGI requires an embodied carrier." While the industry is engrossed in the large model parameter race, ByteDance has quietly constructed a comprehensive chain of "algorithm (Doubao) - computing power (Volcano Engine) - hardware (Unitree) - scenario (TikTok or Douyin)." This layout not only perpetuates Zhang Yiming's entrepreneurial philosophy of "defining boundaries with technology" but also lays a crucial foundation for ByteDance's competition in the second half of the AI era.

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