Jemand hat für Zhang Yiming eine Investition in Unitree getätigt.

Last week, two major pieces of news emerged almost simultaneously. One was that Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance who had stepped down as CEO four years ago, "returned" to Beijing. The other was the Series C financing of Unitree Technology.

These two seemingly unrelated pieces of news have a chemical reaction because of a fund company, namely Jinqiu Fund, one of the leading investors in Unitree Technology's current round of financing.

Jinqiu Fund has a close relationship with Zhang Yiming and ByteDance. The fund was founded in March 2022 by Yang Jie, the former head of financial investment at ByteDance. Most of the core members of the founding team come from ByteDance's investment system and top - tier investment institutions.

More importantly, Zhang Yiming has always been very concerned about technology. In Singapore, he mainly communicates with a large number of researchers. When he returns to China regularly, he also communicates with technical backbones. His emphasis on general artificial intelligence has reached a strategic level. As a representative in the domestic robotics industry, Unitree Technology also regards artificial intelligence as a strategic layout for the company. Its executives have repeatedly expressed their emphasis on general artificial intelligence on important occasions.

It can be said that Jinqiu Fund, as an important link between the two parties, has extended the tentacles of the ByteDance ecosystem to terminal robots.

Zhang Yiming's "Alter Ego"

One day before Zhang Yiming's return, market news reported that Unitree Technology had completed the delivery of its Series C financing that started at the end of last year. The financing was jointly led by a fund under China Mobile, Tencent, Jinqiu Fund, Alibaba, Ant Group, and Geely Capital, and most of the old shareholders participated in the follow - on investment. In response, Unitree Technology said, "We have indeed completed the Series C financing recently."

To some extent, Jinqiu Fund represents Zhang Yiming and the ByteDance ecosystem's attitude towards Unitree Technology.

In terms of the fund's name, Jinqiu Fund has a close relationship with Zhang Yiming and ByteDance. "Jinqiu" comes from Jinqiu Homeland in Beijing, the birthplace of ByteDance. This name carries Zhang Yiming's early entrepreneurial memories and also reflects its close connection with ByteDance.

From a financial perspective, although Jinqiu Fund is registered as an independent private equity fund and the registration information does not directly show ByteDance's investment, several insiders revealed that ByteDance and Zhang Yiming are important financial supporters. This support not only continues ByteDance's investment layout in strategic fields such as AI and overseas expansion but also implies Zhang Yiming's personal tribute to the early entrepreneurial spirit.

In terms of investment direction, Jinqiu Fund is highly coordinated with ByteDance's strategy. It focuses on the AI and overseas expansion tracks. For example, it led the investment in Jet Commerce, an Indonesian e - commerce service provider, and invested in LeXiang Intelligence, an embodied intelligent robot company, and Stardust Intelligence, an AI robot enterprise. These fields complement ByteDance's global layout and technological ecosystem construction. In addition, Jinqiu Fund cooperated with ByteDance's cloud service platform, Volcengine, to launch an AI entrepreneurship competition, further strengthening the integration of industrial resources.

Although ByteDance's strategic investment department was disbanded in early 2022, Jinqiu Fund has, to some extent, inherited its investment logic. The members of the founding team not only continue ByteDance's investment methodology, but some of the invested companies (such as Syrius) also form business synergy with ByteDance's previous investments. It is worth noting that Yang Jie had long led ByteDance's financial investment before joining Jinqiu Fund, and her team background and investment style are in line with ByteDance's strategic thinking.

In summary, Jinqiu Fund can be regarded as an extension of ByteDance's investment ecosystem. It not only carries Zhang Yiming's emotional connection to the origin of his entrepreneurship but also continues ByteDance's strategic layout in the technology field through market - based operations, becoming an important link between ByteDance's industrial resources and external innovation.

For the Sake of AI

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

Although he has stepped down as CEO, Zhang Yiming is still deeply involved in the research and development of general artificial intelligence.

For a long time, Zhang Yiming has regularly participated in the core technology review meetings of the Seed team, personally studied OpenAI papers late into the night, and communicated with top AI researchers. In Singapore, ByteDance has a special research team to assist Zhang Yiming in understanding cutting - edge technologies and discussing research plans. One of them is Feng Jiashi, a former professor at the National University of Singapore and a researcher at ByteDance. Since 2023, he has often tutored Zhang Yiming.

At the same time, Zhang Yiming has also become a "headhunter," personally supervising the poaching of AI talents from competitors, and promoting the Doubao team to launch the "Top Seed Talent Plan" to recruit doctoral graduates with top - level global treatment. He also promoted ByteDance to invest 40 billion yuan in purchasing AI chips in 2025 and spent 6.8 billion US dollars to build data centers overseas to ensure the computing power support for AGI research and development.

Within ByteDance, a unique organizational ecosystem has also been created for the research of general artificial intelligence.

The Seed team is responsible for the iteration of the productized large - model, and Seed Edge focuses on the basic research of general artificial intelligence. The latter adopts a "long - term assessment + result compensation" mechanism, allowing researchers to tackle high - risk topics. ByteDance has established joint laboratories with nearly 20 universities such as Tsinghua AIR and Peking University to explore cutting - edge fields such as multi - modal learning and world models. For example, the VideoWorld model developed in cooperation with Beijing Jiaotong University has achieved unsupervised video understanding and robot task execution.

Unitree Technology is an even more devout believer in general artificial intelligence. "General artificial intelligence refers to the ability of AI to completely imitate human intelligent behavior. For example, it can achieve self - learning, self - improvement, and self - adjustment. At present, this concept can only be seen in some science - fiction works." In the view of Wang Qixin, a director of Unitree Technology, embodied intelligence is a comprehensive concept that integrates physical perception, environmental interaction, and motor ability.

"It highly emphasizes the importance of the body in intelligent behavior. That is, there must be an intelligent agent to perceive the surrounding environment through the body, make decisions and changes after obtaining environmental information, and further interact with the environment to learn." Wang Qixin admitted.

Even without considering the influence of Zhang Yiming and ByteDance, the investment logic of Jinqiu Fund resonates with the technical path of Unitree Technology. Unitree's latest humanoid robot, B1, has achieved a motion control delay of less than 20 ms and developed an open semantic navigation system through the visual - language model (VLM), which can understand natural language instructions.

This technological breakthrough synergizes with Jinqiu Fund's layout in the AI field (such as investing in the AI content platform ZaoMengCiYuan and launching the AI entrepreneurship competition), especially in the commercialization of scenarios such as home services and industrial inspections.

Reshaping ByteDance's AI

Jinqiu Fund's investment gives ByteDance a head start in the future competition of large - models.

ByteDance builds a full - chain AI ability from perception to decision - making through the synergy of "large - model + robot + content ecosystem," injecting "active intelligence" into products such as Douyin and TikTok. It uses general artificial intelligence technology to reshape the competition rules in fields such as cross - border e - commerce and digital content. For example, the synergy between Unitree's logistics robots and TikTok Shop may rewrite the efficiency standards of cross - border logistics.

The Unitree G1 humanoid robot launched by Unitree Technology in February this year has natural language interaction capabilities, and the UltraMem sparse model architecture released by ByteDance's Doubao team at the same time can reduce the inference cost by 83% and improve the interaction efficiency. This coincidence in the technology timeline implies that the two parties may have implicit cooperation in algorithm optimization.

Before DeepSeek became popular, it was a series of ByteDance products that dominated the domestic AI public opinion.

As of the end of November 2024, the cumulative user scale of the Doubao APP in 2024 had successfully exceeded 160 million. At the same time, in November, an average of 800,000 new users downloaded Doubao every day, and the DAU (daily active user number) was close to 9 million, with a growth rate of more than 15%, far ahead of the second - ranked Kimi, whose DAU was 3 million.

On January 27, Chinese New Year's Eve, DeepSeek topped the free APP download rankings in both the Chinese and US regions of the Apple App Store, directly changing the narrative logic of the entire industry. Doubao's old rival, Tencent Yuanbao, chose to abandon its "soul" and directly connect to DeepSeek. On February 13, Tencent Yuanbao officially announced its connection to the full - blooded version of DeepSeek - R1 and opened it to users.

Then, with high - profile investment, Tencent Yuanbao made rapid progress and once overwhelmed all its competitors. On the evening of March 3, Tencent Yuanbao once surpassed the "original" DeepSeek and topped the free list of the Chinese App Store.

According to AppGrowing data, in the first quarter of this year, large technology companies and star startups spent a total of about 1.84 billion yuan on AI product promotion. Among them, Yuanbao's advertising investment alone reached 1.426 billion yuan, 10 times that of Doubao's 138 million yuan.

"In the field of large - models and AI, there is indeed involution - style competition, and it is necessary to return to normal business logic." Tang Daosheng, the senior executive vice - president of Tencent Group and the CEO of the Cloud and Smart Industry Group, called on the industry to avoid "involution - style competition" last September. However, in the face of the popularity of DeepSeek, Tencent became the most aggressive spender.

In the face of the large - model traffic competition triggered by DeepSeek, ByteDance needs to shift its focus to the B - side scenario implementation. The emergence of Unitree Technology provides the possibility for exploring such scenarios. For example, the logistics robots jointly developed by Unitree and Geely are planned to be mass - produced in 2026. If they are connected to Volcengine's edge computing nodes, they can achieve millisecond - level response in "order instructions - path planning - cargo sorting" in cross - border warehousing, directly optimizing the logistics efficiency of TikTok Shop.

It is worth noting that Jinqiu Fund's investment portfolio has formed an "AI + robot" ecological matrix. The Indonesian e - commerce Jet Commerce, in which it led the investment, can form cross - border logistics synergy with TikTok Shop. Stardust Intelligence, in which it invested, focuses on AI robot vision algorithms. These three, together with ByteDance's Volcengine and the 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 needs an embodied carrier." While the industry is obsessed with the large - model parameter competition, ByteDance has quietly built a complete chain of "algorithm (Doubao) - computing power (Volcengine) - hardware (Unitree) - scenario (TikTok or Douyin)." This layout not only continues Zhang Yiming's entrepreneurial philosophy of "defining boundaries with technology" but also lays a key foundation for ByteDance's competition in the second half of the AI era.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Source Byte". Author: Source Byte. Republished by 36Kr with permission.