It is reported that Lin Junyang has obtained investment from Tencent: the first round valuation is 13.5 billion yuan, and a new round of financing has been launched.

On June 15th, according to a report by The Information, two people familiar with the matter revealed that the AI laboratory founded by Lin Junyang, the former head of Alibaba's Qianwen large - model, has completed its first - round financing. The total financing amount reached hundreds of millions of dollars, and the post - investment valuation reached $2 billion (approximately RMB 13.514 billion), which is consistent with the information leaked by The Information in May this year.

The two people familiar with the matter said that this completed round of financing was led by Gao Rong Venture Capital and Sequoia China. Each of these two venture capital institutions invested $100 million (approximately RMB 675 million). In addition, Tencent invested $20 million (approximately RMB 135 million) in this round of financing.

The two people familiar with the matter added that right after completing this round of transactions, Lin Junyang's startup has been seeking to initiate a new round of financing.

As of now, Lin Junyang himself has not publicly announced his startup project. His latest post on the X platform was on June 10th, criticizing the security policy of the Claude Fable 5 model.

Public information on Qichacha shows that within just one month from May to June 2026, "Lin Junyang" intensively registered or took over several companies:

1. He controls Yuyong (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd. through direct 100% holding.

2. As the absolute major shareholder (99%), he established Shanghai Bulage Technology Co., Ltd.

3. Through Shanghai Bulage Technology (as the GP/executive partner) and his own direct 1% investment, he controls Shanghai Gewuzhiyong Management Consulting Partnership.

Although we cannot fully confirm that the "Lin Junyang" in the following picture is the former head of Alibaba's Qianwen large - model, the names of the two companies, "Yuyong Technology" and "Bulage (a transliteration of Pragmatics)", seem to match Lin Junyang's educational background in linguistics.

Several new companies under the name of "Lin Junyang" (Source: Qichacha)

In terms of the establishment time, these companies are highly consistent with the time when The Information first reported on the financing progress of Lin Junyang's new company in May this year. If the above business registration information indeed refers to Lin Junyang himself, then his actions of intensively completing the registration of multiple corporate entities and the establishment of the equity structure in a short period can basically be regarded as a signal of the gradual implementation of his startup entity.

Public information shows that Lin Junyang was born in 1993. He graduated from the English Department of the University of International Relations with a bachelor's degree and from the School of Foreign Languages of Peking University with a master's degree. His research focuses on natural language processing and multimodal representation learning. His academic path is different from most large - model researchers with a "pure computer background", and it is more inclined to the combination of linguistics and computer science.

In 2019, Lin Junyang joined the Intelligent Computing Laboratory of Alibaba's DAMO Academy and participated in the research and development of early multimodal pre - trained models such as M6. Subsequently, at the end of 2022, Alibaba integrated relevant AI teams into the Tongyi Laboratory system. He was appointed as the technical head of the Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) series of large models and became one of the youngest P10 - level technical heads in the Alibaba system.

Conclusion: Lin Junyang may consider entering the world model and embodied brain fields

Lin Junyang may not directly compete with the current leading AI startups in the basic large - model track in this startup.

During his time at Alibaba, Lin Junyang showed an interest in the robot and embodied intelligence track and led the establishment of the Qianwen robot team. In May this year, "Intelligent Emergence" reported that Lin Junyang's potential startup directions include world models and embodied brains.

Now, the basic large - language model track is already very crowded. Lin Junyang's choice to focus on the embodied and world model tracks is a practical option.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zhidongxi" (ID: zhidxcom). The author is Chen Junda, and the editor is Li Shuiqing. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.