Lin Junyang starts a business, and the new company is valued at approximately $2 billion | Exclusive from Intelligence Emergence

Text by | Zhou Xinyu, Deng Yongyi

Edited by | Yang Xuan

Lin Junyang has re - entered the battlefield of AI models as an entrepreneur.

According to exclusive information obtained by Intelligent Emergence, Lin Junyang, the former technical leader of Alibaba's Qianwen large - model, has recently started his own business. The directions he is considering include world models and embodied brains.

Currently, Lin Junyang has recruited several members with backgrounds from ByteDance, Tencent, and overseas, and has started fundraising with a valuation of approximately $2 billion. The funds he has contacted include Sequoia China, Gao Rong Capital, etc.

As of the time of publication, Lin Junyang has not responded to the above information.

Two months have passed since the "lightning" farewell in early March.

Early in the morning on March 4, 2026, Lin Junyang announced on X that he was leaving Qianwen: "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen." Earlier, in the afternoon of March 3, he sent a message in the DingTalk group of Qwen members: "I have no face to lead you anymore."

In the three years when the battle of hundreds of models quickly converged to a competition among giants (ByteDance, Alibaba, DeepSeek), Lin Junyang was the soul figure for Alibaba's Qwen to stay in the front - line echelon of large models.

Since 2022, Lin Junyang has taken over the Alibaba Qwen team and been responsible for the overall work. Over the past three years, he has led the R & D and open - sourcing of the Qwen series of models, promoted the full - scale size and open - source strategy, and made Qwen a domestic model with considerable influence in the global developer community.

During the years when Lin Junyang was in charge, Qwen was "protected" as a relatively independently developed organization. Intelligent Emergence reported exclusively that in order to pursue the efficiency of model training, Qwen previously had its own pre - training, post - training, and Infra teams, and employees in multiple modal directions also worked together.

However, from the perspective of the group, independence can cause resistance to business cooperation.

For example, Intelligent Emergence learned that the group's key ToC super - application, "Qianwen App", did not receive active support from the Qwen team.

On March 3, 2026, a communication meeting around the split and reorganization of the Qwen team became the fuse for Lin Junyang's departure.

In the afternoon of that day, Zhou Jingren, the CTO of Alibaba Cloud, conveyed the Qwen adjustment plan to Lin Junyang: to split the original Qwen into relatively independent horizontal teams such as pre - training, post - training, text, image, and voice. One day later, Lin Junyang officially announced his departure.

Embodied intelligence has become the entry track for Lin Junyang to re - enter the AI battlefield.

This direction was also his unfinished business at Alibaba. In October 2025, Lin Junyang formed a small team focused on robotics and embodied intelligence in Qwen.

On X, he put forward his judgment: "Multimodal foundation models are transforming into foundation agents, using tools and memory for long - term sequential reasoning through reinforcement learning. They should move from the virtual to the physical world!"

In Silicon Valley, several AI experts have devoted themselves to world models and embodied brains.

World Labs, a spatial intelligence company founded by Fei - Fei Li, the former vice - president of Google and the "godmother" of AI, officially announced a $1 billion financing in February 2026, with a valuation of up to $5 billion;

In March, AMI Labs, a world - model company founded by Yann LeCun (Turing Award winner) and DiT architecture proposer Xie Saining, completed a $1.03 billion seed - round financing without any products, and its pre - investment valuation reached $3.5 billion.

Zhou Xian, a Chinese researcher who also entered the field of embodied brains, announced that his Genesis AI completed a $105 million seed - round financing in July 2025.

In the context of the convergence of LLM technology routes, embodied intelligence and world models, which have many disputes and possibilities in their routes, have become the non - consensus areas that VCs and AI experts are willing to bet on.

An AI industry insider once commented to Intelligent Emergence: "Lin Junyang is at least a talent worth over $100 million." However, some investors have also expressed concerns about technology talents starting businesses: "Large companies are not as free, but they also provide a relatively safe and controllable environment. Technology executives often have difficulty adapting to commercialization when starting businesses."

Putting aside the technological halo of his Alibaba era, entrepreneur Lin Junyang will face the test of the business world next.

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