- The former head of Tongyi Qwen research is raising hundreds of millions of dollars, with HongShan Capital and Gaorong Capital participating in investment talks.
- The new venture follows his sudden departure from Alibaba, which came after the tech giant underwent a major restructuring of its AI team.
Lin Junyang, a former core artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Alibaba Group, is raising funds for a newly established AI lab.
The funding round aims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, which is expected to bring the lab's valuation to about $2 billion, according to a report by The Information on Wednesday.
HongShan Capital and Gaorong Capital are currently in contact with Lin's new lab to discuss potential investment partnerships.
However, the negotiations have not yet been finalized, and the lab's future valuation figure may still be subject to adjustment, The Information reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Born in 1993, Lin was once Alibaba's youngest top-tier technical expert. He is widely recognized in the industry as one of China's leading talents in the field of foundational large models.
In early March this year, he announced his resignation on social media, a move that sent shockwaves through the tech community.
The reason behind his departure was a divergence in development philosophy with the management. At the time, Alibaba was planning a massive structural adjustment for the Qwen team, splitting it into multiple independent groups such as pre-training and post-training.
Lin's exit is closely related to the new organizational restructuring of Alibaba's Tongyi lab, as the company planned to divide the Tongyi Qwen team into several independent research and development units.
After joining Alibaba in 2019, he led the development of several critical models and participated in the entire research and development process of Tongyi Qwen from scratch as a core architect.
The open-source Qwen 3.5 small-sized model launched by his team once received public praise from Elon Musk.
The capital market's high valuation of the lab reflects strong interest from global investors in top AI talent, similar to the massive premiums commanded by former OpenAI executives when founding new companies.
Nevertheless, the startup will still face severe industry challenges in the future. While exploring paths to commercialization, they must navigate practical issues such as the shortage of high-end GPU computing power and fierce competition from tech giants.
