Doubao, the talented post-90s, has raised 1.3 billion yuan in financing.

Another post-90s prodigy has emerged.

Yesterday, according to the disclosure from 5Y Capital, Shanghai-based personal AI assistant company Today AI has raised a total of more than 200 million US dollars in financing, equivalent to about 1.336 billion RMB. Its investors include IDG Capital, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Ant Group, HSG, Transsion Holdings, Tongge Venture Capital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Hanyuan Asset, etc.

In this era where "everyone with a dream can shine on the grand AI stage", the 1.3-billion-yuan financing is not particularly eye-catching on its own. However, this company was only registered in March this year, and the domestic version of its core product Today was only launched on September 25. By the time this round of financing was made public, less than a month had passed. What's more, US dollar funds, internet giants, mobile phone manufacturers, and capital with university backgrounds are all sitting at the table of this investment.

The founder, Qi Junyuan, a post-90s talent, used to be Vice President of Feishu Product and was also in charge of the PC version of Doubao.

If you ask what the most practical AI is at the moment, the answers may vary from person to person, including Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Kimi... But when it comes to the most frequently used AI in daily life, I believe it must be Doubao.

No matter what tricky problem you have, it's always a safe bet to ask Doubao first, which is probably the real portrayal of most people. This has also made Doubao the most frequently used AI product. And Qi Junyuan's identity as the person in charge of the PC version of Doubao may be the most attractive point for investors.

In his junior year, he wrote 220,000 lines of code

Many people got to know Qi Junyuan from Teambition. But to tell his story, we have to start from his time in the lab.

Qi Junyuan's father is a university professor engaged in scientific research, and he often spent time in the lab since junior high school. When he was in high school, he participated in a project of the Institute of Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences to identify the sex of parrots, and successfully completed it.

Normally, this should have been the starting point of a teenage scientist. But later he found that a single device abroad could solve similar problems, so he gave up his dream of scientific research.

After entering Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he wanted to build a company like Xerox that can change the society. In his view, starting a business can help and influence far more people than staying in the lab. His first project was a health record platform that allowed people to upload medical records and manage them online. He obtained 2.5 million yuan of angel investment, recruited more than 30 people, but the project still failed in the end.

He invested the remaining more than 1 million yuan in his second project. That was in 2011, when he was a junior. The project was called Teambition, a lightweight collaboration tool for small and medium-sized teams, and also one of the earliest batches of collaborative office SaaS products in China. With a background in economics and management, he spent half a year teaching himself programming and wrote 220,000 lines of code.

In the following years, institutions such as Gobi Partners and IDG Capital entered the market one after another. The Series A round was 5 million US dollars, and the Series B round of 12 million US dollars was led by Northern Light Venture Capital. It took about 3 years to go from the angel round to Series B. In 2016, Tencent made a strategic investment; in 2019, Alibaba acquired Teambition for about 100 million US dollars.

He was selected into the Forbes China 30 Under 30 list, and was regarded as one of the representative figures of post-90s entrepreneurs.

After the acquisition, he stayed at Alibaba and served as the person in charge of Alibaba Cloud Drive, with the job level of P9. Alibaba Cloud Drive was officially launched in 2021, and the original Teambition cloud disk stopped its service accordingly, with user data migrated to Alibaba Cloud Drive. After leaving Alibaba in 2021, he remained out of the public eye for a period of time.

He returned to the public view in January 2023. Qi Junyuan joined ByteDance as Vice President of Feishu Product, reporting directly to Xie Xin, CEO of Feishu. A year later, he transferred to the Flow team responsible for AI applications and took over the PC version of Doubao.

That was the most intense period of competition for large model applications. ByteDance bet heavily on Doubao, and the PC end was one of its important positions. In September 2025, ByteDance's AI business line was adjusted, and the Doubao PC end, mobile end and model strategy team were changed to report to Zhao Qi.

Two months later, some media reported that he had left his job. From joining ByteDance to leaving, less than three years had passed.

A young man who was chased by investors even before graduating from university, after stints at two top tech giants, returned to the path of starting a business. Shifting from collaboration tools and enterprise services all the way to AI applications, some media described him as a "restless product person".

From Teambition to Alibaba Cloud Drive, and then to Doubao at ByteDance, Qi Junyuan's resume almost covers the three most high-quality product positions in China's internet industry: collaborative office, cloud storage, and large model applications.

This cross-cutting product experience covering SaaS, cloud computing and AI is extremely scarce in the current entrepreneurial environment.

More critically, he has experienced the full cycle of Teambition from 0 to 1 and from 1 to acquisition. The quality of this "full-stack entrepreneur" is the core reason why top-tier institutions dare to place heavy bets on him as early as the angel round.

1.3 billion yuan, betting on a "proactive" assistant

About four months after leaving ByteDance, on March 4, 2026, Cijian Infinite (Shanghai) Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. was registered, with a registered capital of 10 million US dollars, and Qi Junyuan as its legal representative. The company is named "Cijian" (which means "the present moment"), and the product is simply called Today, both of which focus on the concept of "the present".

When the company first emerged, there were many speculations from the outside world. Z Finance reported at that time that the company had completed two rounds of financing, with investors including top US dollar funds such as IDG, and its valuation reached hundreds of millions of US dollars. Other reports said that the company's direction was large model-driven intelligent terminals and GUI Agent, and many people speculated based on this that Qi Junyuan was going to make an "Agent mobile phone".

Half a year later, what is presented to users is a personal AI assistant that can be used on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. Today has previously been in public beta overseas, and its domestic version was launched on September 25. The basic version is free, and new users can get 100 million Tokens and one month of Pro membership for free.

Compared with common chatbots, the biggest difference of Today lies in the word "proactive". According to the official statement, it can understand users through long-term interactions and provide assistance before users speak out their demands. The official lists a wide range of usage scenarios, from schedule manager and travel customizer to learning practice partner, and even a listening companion.

Specifically, after users grant authorization, Today will continuously read emails, calendars, notes and files, remember important people, user preferences, promises made to others and unfinished tasks. When there is progress in a task, it will proactively remind users; when manual operations are needed, it can also call the cloud computer to continue working on web pages, files and other applications.

The domestic version is connected to tools such as WeCom, WeChat Read, Baidu Netdisk, Kingsoft Docs, and Tencent Meeting. It can record messages in work groups, sort out reading notes, find documents in the cloud disk, and generate meeting minutes. Another media outlet conducted a test: asking Today to arrange an interview, it found the contact from the email, checked the calendar, gave time suggestions and drafted the email, and did not send it until the user confirmed. The next day, when the other party replied, it did not wait for new instructions, but connected the email with the task from the previous day automatically.

Checking emails, looking at calendars, and sending messages are not new capabilities. What Today wants to do is to keep tasks "alive" even after the conversation ends. Users do not need to open separate windows or create projects for each task, and work and life matters can be put into the same dialog box for Today to sort out on its own.

However, proactivity also has its downside. A media author used it for ten consecutive days, and Today sent him topic suggestions at 9 a.m. every day, and even proactively asked about the progress of his draft, which made him quite surprised. But at other times, it seemed to lack a proper sense of propriety.

When installing a game mod, it successively gave several unverified solutions. The author spent more than an hour trying to solve the problem but failed, and did not find the root cause until he asked Today to check the official documentation. A 60-minute football training plan that the author just wanted to read out and use was treated as a background task and ran for nearly an hour, and finally output a web page.

The author's view is that it still cannot distinguish which tasks are light and which are heavy. Moreover, the more the assistant remembers and the more proactive it is, the more users will value its accuracy, permission boundaries and privacy protection capabilities.

Overseas, some players have already embarked on this path. On September 22, 2025, OpenAI's proactive function ChatGPT Pulse was launched in preview, pushing personalized briefings to users every day. Exactly one year later on the same day, the domestic version of Today was launched.

According to public records, 5Y Capital also invested in AirJelly, a proactive desktop Agent developed by another ByteDance-affiliated team. Tencent and Ant Group, which both hold their own super entry points, jointly invested in this external startup this time; Transsion's main battlefield is mobile phones in emerging markets, which more or less matches the previous rumor of the "Agent mobile phone".

The resume of a person who has developed collaboration tools, cloud drives, Feishu and Doubao may itself be the most valuable part in this round of financing.

The young geniuses who left top tech giants to start businesses

Qi Junyuan is not the first entrepreneur who left a top tech giant to start a business, nor will he be the last.

Statistics show that in this wave of large model development, at least 30 mid-to-senior level employees from ByteDance have left to start their own businesses. Previously, some people exposed the unique betting method of large model investors: they stake out near ByteDance's office buildings in Dazhongsi and North Third Ring Road in Beijing, and Yangpu District in Shanghai, track personnel movements on LinkedIn and Maimai, and record the candidates' job levels, reporting lines and products they have led in the spreadsheets of investment managers.

Some people have not even left their jobs, but the Term Sheet (TS) has already been delivered to their hands. Some institutions even directly handed out blank TSs, allowing entrepreneurs to fill in the terms by themselves. In the investment circle, there is a term for "Ex-ByteDance" talents, called "valuation multiplier".

There is a long list of names. Chen Mian, who used to work for Jianying (CapCut), founded LiblibAI and design agent Lovart, and completed nearly 300 million US dollars of Series B+ financing in the first half of this year, with a post-investment valuation of more than 2 billion US dollars.

There are also younger entrepreneurs. Pan Yuyang, born in 1997, experienced the whole process of developing the Coze intelligent assistant and Doubao smart glasses from 0 to 1 at ByteDance. After leaving, he founded OdyssLife, an AI smart necklace brand, and has raised nearly 200 million yuan in multiple rounds of financing, which were successively led by HSG and Lisi Capital.

Liang Chenqi, who was in charge of the AI companion product "Cat Box", switched to AI comic creation and obtained angel round financing from IDG Capital and Meituan. Lin Junyang, the former head of Alibaba's Qwen large model, left his job and founded an AI laboratory. Before the company had any products, its post-investment valuation in the first round reached about 2 billion US dollars. Even interns have become sought-after targets: 17-year-old Chen Guangyu just posted a message to say goodbye to Kimi, and he received an offer immediately.

Most of these people are young and have led well-known products in top tech giants. What investors value is often not only what they are doing at the moment, but also where they have accumulated experience. The basic judgment is that when the technical path is not yet clear, investors regard the top tech giant background as a risk control tool.

To a certain extent, top tech giants have become transfer stations for these geniuses.

More than a decade ago, Qi Junyuan was the college student who obtained financing in his junior year, and raised funds all the way until his product was acquired by Alibaba with a collaboration tool. In today's context, he would probably be the "genius youth" that investors talk about. More than ten years later, he spent several years at Alibaba and ByteDance respectively, and stepped out with a longer resume.

However, no matter how impressive the entrepreneur list is or how high the valuation is, it is only the beginning. Today is still learning how to be a "properly measured" assistant, and the stakes this time are much higher than they used to be.

The answer will ultimately be given by the product itself.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), Author: Wang Tao, Editor: Wu Ren, published with authorization from 36Kr.