Uncovering the Capital Backers Behind the Largest Financing of the "Six AI Tigers"

A Large-Scale AI Model Financing Exceeding 5 Billion Yuan

On January 26, 2026, a financing deal worth over 5 billion yuan refreshed the record for the single-round financing amount of large model startups in the past 12 months. Not long ago, on the last day of 2025, the large model startup Dark Side of the Moon officially announced a new round of financing of 500 million US dollars.

The company that set the record is one of the few large model startups in the field - Jieyue Xingchen.

According to "Intelligent Emergence", its recently completed Series B+ financing of over 5 billion yuan involved institutional investors such as Shanghai Guotou Leading Fund, China Life Equity Investment, Pudong Venture Capital, Xuhui Capital, Wuxi Liangxi Fund, Xiamen ITG, and Huaqin Technology, as well as follow - on investments from existing shareholders such as Tencent, Qiming Venture Partners, and Morningside Venture Capital.

"The large number of shareholders and the grand lineup are quite rare," an insider commented. He told "Intelligent Emergence" that it only took half a year from the start of the Series B+ financing to the end of the process.

Following the Hong Kong IPOs of Zhipu and MiniMax and the announced financing of Dark Side of the Moon, Jieyue Xingchen continued the capital myth in the large model track at the beginning of the year.

This company, which has always been known for its low - key and mysterious style, began to fully show its edge. Apart from the high - profile financing amount, another important move of Jieyue Xingchen was to announce Yin Qi as its leader.

Yin Qi, Chairman of Qianli Technology & Jieyue Xingchen

Previously, Yin Qi, the chairman of Qianli Technology, appeared in Jieyue Xingchen's circle as a strategic partner in the automotive field. Now, he steps forward as the "Chairman of Jieyue Xingchen", and the significance is self - evident.

Jieyue Xingchen has a more well - known spokesperson in the technology, capital, and industrial chain circles. Yin Qi's overall control of Jieyue also means that the technical system, operational experience, and business resources he accumulated at Megvii and Qianli will serve as ammunition for Jieyue Xingchen in the final battle of large models.

With the listings of Zhipu and MiniMax, there was once a view in the market that the primary market could no longer support the financing of large model startups, and going public would be the dividing line between victory and defeat.

However, it is obvious that the successive large - scale financings of Dark Side of the Moon and Jieyue Xingchen have sent optimistic signals to both the primary market and startups: The primary market still has the strength to support the development of large models; the basic models are still evolving, and investors are still willing to bet on them.

At the same time, the aggressive entry of ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, and the undetermined new model of DeepSeek have also made the investment criteria for large models in the primary market more and more stringent.

An industry insider told "Intelligent Emergence" that the biggest consideration for large model startups in the primary market has become whether there is a survival space for independent large models, whether the commercialization logic is unique, and whether the commercialization quality is competitive.

At this time, Jieyue Xingchen's new financing worth over 5 billion yuan is particularly valuable.

To understand this round of financing, we can look at the two aspects that the primary market currently values the most: technology and commercialization.

First, look at technology. Few people realize that Jieyue Xingchen is the only company among the six rising stars that truly focuses on multi - modality.

Then, look at business. The uniqueness of Jieyue Xingchen lies in that it has penetrated into the terminals in the physical world.

An executive of Jieyue Xingchen described to "Intelligent Emergence" that while others want to be the "Chinese OpenAI" or the "Chinese Anthropic", Jieyue is more like the "Chinese xAI + Tesla".

The unique ecological niche in the large model track has also created a stable capital structure behind Jieyue Xingchen: The diversification and balance of US - dollar funds, state - owned capital, and industrial capital.

Among the six rising stars in the large model field, Jieyue Xingchen appeared the latest and maintained a low - key profile. Interestingly, Jieyue Xingchen, which is collectively bet on by the three types of capital, has always been a company with a non - consensus spirit in the large model track.

Jieyue Xingchen Made the "Non - Consensus" Choice in the Consensus

Founded in April 2023, Jieyue Xingchen didn't really appear in the industry until nearly a year later.

In the recollection of an insider, Jieyue Xingchen appeared "late", "so late that the other large model startups had almost attracted all the attention in the primary market."

At that time, the hottest target was "Beyond Light Years" founded by Wang Huiwen, who returned to the arena. The co - founder of Meituan's comeback instantly attracted more than a dozen first - tier institutions and individual investors, which made it difficult for the large model startups that came after Beyond Light Years to start smoothly. The reason was that Beyond Light Years absorbed a large amount of capital from the primary market.

This also led to the fact that Jieyue's first - round financing almost came from the "friend circles" of several co - founders: Sequoia Capital China, Qiming Venture Partners, and IDG.

However, in the eyes of many Jieyue employees, being "late" was worth it. Jiang Daxin, the CEO of Jieyue Xingchen, once mentioned in an interview with "Intelligent Emergence" that Jieyue's "latency" was due to thorough preparations:

"We wanted to accumulate energy to build a large model with trillions of parameters." This energy included computing power, algorithms, data, and the system that was not yet in the spotlight at that time. At that time, Jieyue found Zhu Yibo, who had experience in operating clusters of tens of thousands of graphics cards at ByteDance, to be responsible for the system construction of Jieyue.

Meanwhile, a clear path to AGI was also taking shape in the team's mind: Single - modality - Multi - modality - Unification of multi - modal understanding and generation - World model - AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Later, no matter how the industry landscape changed, this path, as firm as a tattoo, remained unchanged.

"At that time, the team basically filled its resource pool," an early member said. "The market will judge the team with the greatest ability to build large models." Even at a less favorable time for financing, Jieyue's debut made it the only company among the six rising stars to become a unicorn through its first - round financing.

Facts proved that thorough preparations enabled Jieyue to train a large model with hundreds of billions of parameters, Step - 1, in less than two months, and it was successful on the first try.

This also gave Jieyue a promising start for its second - round financing. It was obvious that the lineup of this round of financing, in terms of both the number of participants and the diversity of funds, far exceeded that of the first round: There were both US - dollar funds represented by Morningside Venture Capital and Shunwei Capital, as well as strategic investments such as Lenovo Capital and Incubator.

After the eventful start, the following two years saw a rapid development in the large model track - consensus and FOMO quickly formed as a few companies and products broke through, but then quickly disappeared with the bursting of the bubble.

Among them, the most alluring was the advertising investment war in 2024. With a quarterly advertising investment budget of about 100 million yuan, Kimi of Dark Side of the Moon and Doubao of ByteDance emerged.

Advertising investment not only brought considerable data and a magnified market influence but also money. In 2024, Dark Side of the Moon once became the company with the fastest - growing financing among the six rising stars:

At the beginning of the year, a financing of over 1 billion US dollars led by Alibaba and followed by Lisi Capital and others instantly raised the valuation of Dark Side of the Moon to 2.5 billion US dollars.

After that, Dark Side of the Moon carried out a series of continuous financings in 2024, pushing its valuation to the top among the six rising stars, which was driven by the popularity of its consumer - facing application Kimi.

The sentiment in the primary market was also affected by Alibaba's entry. "At that time, almost all investors thought that the era of basic models was over, and it was time to compete in product innovation," an industry insider recalled.

In the eyes of many insiders, the Series B financing that started in mid - 2024 was the most difficult round for Jieyue. "Why don't you invest in advertising?" an insider revealed that this was the most frequently asked question by investors at that time. Even some members of the team were in a dilemma: whether they should allocate hundreds of millions of yuan for growth.

In the consensus of advertising investment, the above - mentioned insider said that "it was exactly the moment when faith was most needed." He remembered that Jieyue had conducted in - depth first - principle thinking about consumer - facing products:

First, current consumer - facing products have no marginal effect. The more they are used, the greater the losses. Second, the data generated by consumer users can only be used to build user profiles and is of little help to actual model training. Third, the economic model of advertising investment is not viable, and product retention cannot be guaranteed.

The final conclusion pointed to caution regarding consumer - facing products and advertising investment. "Even though the product data was good, they were very restrained with consumer - facing products," the above - mentioned insider told "Intelligent Emergence". Jieyue only used a small amount of resources to verify the product.

At that time, Jieyue's internal judgment was still to focus on basic models, especially multi - modality. To achieve AGI, the model not only needs to be smart enough but also be able to "see", "hear", and feel and understand everything.

An employee once recalled that in 2024, Jieyue's core goal was to follow the AGI path determined on the first day of its establishment and strive to move from native multi - modality to integrated multi - modal understanding and generation. This was a more difficult path that required a longer R & D cycle.

This also meant that shareholders who participated in the Series B financing were also facing a moment of testing their faith. An investment manager who participated in the Series B financing said that the investors in the Series B were attracted by the trillion - parameter language model Step - 2 and the multi - modal understanding large model Step - 1.5V released in July 2024.

This group of model believers included the newly entered Shanghai State - owned Capital Investment Co., Ltd. and its affiliated funds, HKIC in Hong Kong, Tencent Investment, and some existing shareholders who continued to invest.

"Jieyue progresses steadily and is not aggressive enough in various aspects, which may cause it to miss some time windows," an executive of Jieyue commented. "But time will prove that being steady is a valuable advantage."

One year later, the Series B+ financing that started in July 2025 became a rich reward for Jieyue Xingchen's perseverance in its beliefs.

During this period, there were various hot topics on the battlefield such as RL (Reinforcement Learning), Coding, and Agentic, and the FOMO sentiment was widespread. At the WAIC (World Artificial Intelligence Conference) in July 2025, among a group of models focusing on Coding and Agentic, Jieyue's model answer was a bit "alternative":

A reasoning model integrating multi - modal capabilities, Jieyue's third - generation base model Step - 3. Due to its special design at the system level, the reasoning efficiency of Step - 3 was 300% that of the once - popular DeepSeek - R1.

Behind this lies another non - consensus choice of Jieyue. It is the only startup team that has made large - scale investments in building its own AI infrastructure. Its emphasis on enabling the model to be truly scalable and cost - effective through system capabilities also reflects Jieyue's practical side.

Multi - modality remains Jieyue's technological belief and the inevitable path to AGI. "No matter how the industry changes, Jieyue has never deviated from the path to AGI since its first day of establishment," the above - mentioned executive told "Intelligent Emergence".

This has also brought a very special shareholder structure to Jieyue: Most shareholders either only invested in Jieyue among the six rising stars or invested the most in Jieyue. "Those who love Jieyue will love it deeply," he summarized.

From the Exhibition Match to the Elimination Round

The still - booming model track and the ever - changing industry landscape will not give the players on the field much time to catch their breath and feel complacent. After three years of trial - and - error, the exhibition match decorated with beautiful data is over. To gain the recognition of the primary and secondary markets, model companies must show real - world performance.

At the beginning of 2026, capital has made its final choice. With the IPOs of Zhipu and MiniMax and the financings of Jieyue Xingchen and Dark Side of the Moon, the four companies remaining in the final round all have similar amounts of cash on their books and are all preparing resources and getting ready for the final battle to stay in the game.

For Jieyue Xingchen, it is also time to bid farewell to its low - key style and show its strength. It can be seen that since 2025, several core technical experts of Jieyue Xingchen have actively stepped forward to share their insights.

"Most companies only have their CEOs as spokespersons, but Jieyue Xingchen has more than one soul figure," an employee of Jieyue described.

Jieyue's technological capabilities are supported by Jiang Daxin, the CEO who once led the R & D of well - known products such as Bing and Microsoft 365 at Microsoft; Zhu Yibo, the CTO who was once the head of AI Infrastructure at ByteDance; and Zhang Xiangyu, the core author of ResNet (the most - cited paper globally since the 21st century) and the chief scientist of Jieyue. An investor once told "Intelligent Emergence" that the core talents of Jieyue would be popular targets in the market even if they started their own businesses independently.

From left to right: Jiang Daxin, CEO of Jieyue Xingchen; Zhu Yibo, CTO of Jieyue Xingchen; Zhang Xiangyu, Chief Scientist of Jieyue Xingchen

With the return of Yin Qi, Jieyue may enter a final - battle mode that is more determined and prepared for a long - term fight. The team has top - notch talents aiming for AGI and a sober leader who has experienced tough battles and the difficult times of the "Four Little Dragons" era.

In the future, commercialization achievements will be crucial. Currently, following in the footsteps of OpenAI and Anthropic, most companies in the final round are playing it safe in terms of business models: Zhipu focuses on B2B, while MiniMax and Dark Side of the Moon focus on B2C, offering software - related products.

The most mainstream commercialization narratives in the large model track are consumer - facing subscriptions and B2B API sales and model customization. Currently, the other three large model startups remaining in the game, Zhipu, MiniMax, and Dark Side of