Scramble for post-2000s talents from Tsinghua University

The post-2000 generation is now taking the stage in the venture capital circle —

Within 5 months, LiberAI has completed 4 rounds of financing intensively, with total financing exceeding 1 billion yuan; LatentVerse closed a premium seed round in less than 3 months after its establishment; even earlier, OriginFlow announced the completion of three rounds of financing in one go...

You may not be familiar with these companies. After all, they are all new faces in the venture capital circle, led by post-2000 founders, some of whom have not even graduated. Right after their establishment, waves of investors came knocking on their doors.

Looking further back, you will find that they all share a similar starting point: Tsinghua University.

Post-2000 Generation Tsinghua Alumni Are Lining Up to Announce Financing Deals

In their early 20s, right in the prime of youth, they have started to take charge of their own companies.

The latest development is that this month, world model company LiberAI completed a new round of hundreds of millions of yuan Pre-A++ financing, with investors including Zhongguancun Science City, Dachen Caizhi, Gaoxin Capital, and Huaying Capital. Behind LiberAI is Liu Songming, a post-2000 PhD candidate at Tsinghua University.

With such a young founding team, LiberAI is advancing with full force. In the latest official evaluation by RoboDojo, its Liber-0 Preview model outperformed GPT-6 Astra, demonstrating strong capabilities just a few months after its establishment. Fresh to the industry, this young talent has been sought after by investors — within 5 months, LiberAI has received consecutive bets from top-tier institutions including HSG, ZhenFund, Meituan Dragonball, and Shunwei Capital, with total financing exceeding 1 billion yuan.

Looking around, most of this wave of post-2000 entrepreneurs are gathered in the AI field. A month ago, embodied foundational model company LatentVerse completed a seed round of hundreds of millions of yuan. The investor lineup is equally premium, including GL Ventures, Qingliu Capital, Inno Angel Fund, Agibot, and Starfield Era.

Also very young, LatentVerse was founded in May 2026. Hu Yucheng, its founder and CEO, is a post-2000 PhD candidate at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University, studying under Chen Jianyu, assistant professor at the IIIS and founder of Starfield Era, and he once participated in embodied intelligence foundational model research at ByteDance Seed.

Guanghui Innovation has an even higher proportion of post-2000 members — its entire founding team is made up of post-2000s. Among them, Wang Chen Yuhang, co-founder and CEO, studied in the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University for both his bachelor's and master's degrees. Founded in February this year, the company is committed to "enabling robots to have the sense of touch". In just a few months, it has successively completed tens of millions of yuan in seed round and angel round financing, led by Frees Fund and a dual-currency financial investment institution, with follow-on investments from Hatch Robotics, Infinite Fund SEE Fund, and Shuimu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund.

OriginFlow also left a deep impression on the venture capital circle — in May, it announced the successive completion of angel round, strategic round, and Pre-A1 round of financing, with total accumulated financing exceeding 500 million yuan, bringing together well-known institutions including BlueRun Ventures, Oasis Capital, 58 Industrial Investment, Puhua Capital, Shuimu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund, Monolith Capital, Yuanhe Puhua, Yuanhe Origin, and Guofang Venture Capital. The founder behind it is Qin Shentao, 25 years old, who is currently a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University.

Extending the timeline, there are more names on this list: Zero Power Robotics completed 4 rounds of financing 18 months after its establishment; Gongji Technology targets the token economy, aiming to make computing power as accessible as electricity and charge by usage; Wange Zhiyuan, which focuses on end-side infrastructure in the AI era... All of them are post-2000 entrepreneurial teams from Tsinghua University.

Unconsciously, the venture capital circle has ushered in the post-2000 era.

Come Closer, Step Into Tsinghua University Campus

This time, Tsinghua University is still at the center of the stage.

In every previous wave of technological innovation, Tsinghua has always been at the forefront. On one hand, as a top-tier university, Tsinghua gathers the most outstanding talents across the country and always stays at the cutting edge of science and technology; on the other hand, Tsinghua established a mature technology achievement transformation system very early, with a strong entrepreneurial atmosphere among its alumni.

We can recall the historic moment created by Tsinghua-affiliated enterprises this year — CXTC Technology was listed on the STAR Market, with its market value once exceeding 4 trillion yuan; Zhipu's stock price surged 20 times within half a year, and its market value once exceeded 1 trillion Hong Kong dollars; almost at the same time, the A-share market value of Innolight also stood above 1 trillion yuan. The leaders of these three trillion-yuan companies are all representative post-1970s figures from Tsinghua.

Post-1980s Tsinghua talents followed closely. In 2011, three Tsinghua Yao Class alumni Yin Qi, Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu co-founded Megvii, which became one of the "Four AI Dragons" in the AI 1.0 era. Later, Tang Wenbin started his second venture and founded embodied intelligence company ForceBot; Yin Qi became the chairman of StepFun; Cao Xudong and Lou Tiancheng both entered the autonomous driving field, and their companies Momenta and Pony.ai have both achieved successful listing so far.

There is also Wang Qian, founder of Independent Variable Robotics, who graduated from Tsinghua with bachelor's and master's degrees. At the end of 2023 when the AI wave was surging, he started his business in Nanshan, Shenzhen. Now the valuation of Independent Variable Robotics has exceeded 20 billion yuan, and it is reported that the company has secretly submitted its IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In this wave of AI development, post-1990s Tsinghua figures are also highly visible. The most prominent one is Yang Zhilin from Moonshot AI. In its latest round of financing, Moonshot AI's valuation has reached 50 billion US dollars. It is reported that Moonshot AI has submitted Form A1 to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in a confidential manner, officially launching its Hong Kong stock IPO process.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Investors describe the profile of Tsinghua entrepreneurs as follows — "First, they have excellent technical capabilities, which is a remarkable feature of most Tsinghua entrepreneurs, and they all have persistent pursuit of technology; second, they have lofty goals, most Tsinghua students have a sense of mission for the times, which makes them more firm when facing huge challenges."

That is why the Tsinghua community has always been an important channel for investors to source projects. As it is scheduled on October 8, the "X-Day" Xiluhu Roadshow Salon × "Venture Capital China" Sci-Tech Roadshow Hall AI for Science Special Session will enter Tsinghua University, selecting high-quality sci-tech projects with core technologies, independent intellectual property rights and commercialization potential. It is well known that Tsinghua University boasts top scientific research resources, interdisciplinary advantages and a mature alumni venture capital ecosystem, and is the core carrier for domestic AI for Science technology R&D and achievement transformation.

Looking back at earlier developments, the "X-Day" Xiluhu Roadshow Salon, which originated in Nanshan, Shenzhen, has long been deeply engaged in the mining, incubation and acceleration of AI hard technology projects, accumulating a large number of high-quality projects in the commercialization stage and supporting resources for industrial implementation. Up to now, it has successively held 20 themed roadshows, attracting more than 550 projects to sign up, with 60 enterprises obtaining equity financing totaling over 3.336 billion yuan, creating a highly landmark scene in China's early-stage sci-tech innovation ecosystem.

The future always belongs to the young generation.

We are witnessing that the baton of the venture capital circle is being passed to the post-2000 generation.

This article is from WeChat official account "pedaily.cn" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Wu Qiong, and authorized for release by 36Kr.