- China Telecom will leverage its strengths in cloud computing and computing power networks to engage in deep business collaboration with ModelBest.
- ModelBest recently open-sourced its next-generation multimodal flagship model, MiniCPM-o 4.5.
Chinese AI startup ModelBest today announced its first post-Chinese New Year funding round of hundreds of millions of yuan, led by China Telecom with participation from CITIC Goldstone and CITIC Private Equity.
As a core strategic investor, China Telecom will leverage its strengths in cloud computing and computing power networks to engage in deep business collaboration with ModelBest across complex application scenarios.
The two parties will leverage complementary strengths, combining ModelBest's algorithm deployment experience in fields like legal services, automotive, and education to jointly expand AI technology R&D and commercial applications.
Earlier this month, the company open-sourced its next-generation multimodal flagship model MiniCPM-o 4.5, touted as the industry's first large model enabling instant free-form dialogue without interrupting perception.
With a streamlined 9 billion parameters, the model achieves industry-leading performance across multimodal metrics including visual understanding, speech generation, and cloning.
To date, its flagship MiniCPM series of open-source models — known for high efficiency and low cost — has surpassed 24 million cumulative downloads across major platforms, achieving large-scale deployment in automotive, smartphones, AIPC, and smart home sectors.
As large model evolution shifts from sheer scale to density, ModelBest's edge-side lightweight approach aligns with the current market trend of rational AI investment.
ModelBest CEO Li Dahai said that the company will remain committed to enhancing model knowledge density, empowering diverse smart terminals, and accelerating progress toward general artificial intelligence.
