Breaking: Lin Junyang’s New AI Lab Targets $2 B Valuation

After announcing his departure from Alibaba’s Qwen team in early March, Lin Junyang cleared his Xiaohongshu profile and updated his nickname, avatar and bio, signaling a new direction.

According to two sources cited by The Information, Lin is now raising several hundred million dollars for a newly founded AI lab, and the post‑money valuation could reach $2 billion, though the exact figure remains under discussion.

Venture firms Gaorong Capital and Sequoia Capital have reportedly begun investment talks with the lab, and Lin has already recruited a handful of engineers with backgrounds at ByteDance, Tencent and overseas companies.

The Information notes that a $2 billion valuation for a Chinese AI startup is almost unheard of, as Chinese startups typically receive far lower valuations than their U.S. counterparts, highlighting the high expectations investors have for the AI sector.

The lab’s official name and research focus have not been disclosed, but Lin previously authored a long essay titled “From Reasoning‑Based Thinking to Agentic Thinking,” which may hint at future directions.

Lin Junyang, born in 1993, was Alibaba’s youngest P10‑level technical executive before leaving. He played a key role in the development of the Qwen open‑source model family, scaling parameters to the trillion‑level and leading the M6 multimodal model team to improve training efficiency.

In October 2025, Lin formed a robotics and embodied‑intelligence group within Qwen, aiming to move models out of virtual screens into real‑world perception and manipulation.

Although not a front‑line researcher, Lin’s co‑authored papers have amassed over 51,000 citations.

If the AI lab materializes, Lin will transition from a senior leader in a large tech company to the head of an independent research laboratory.