Tencent Invests $20 M in Ex‑Alibaba AI Leader Lin Junyang’s New Lab, Valuing It at $2 B as He Seeks Next Round
Tencent has contributed $20 million to Lin Junyang’s newly founded AI Lab, bringing the post‑money valuation to roughly $2 billion, while the founder—formerly Alibaba’s youngest P10 technical executive and key figure behind the Qwen model series—already begins looking for a follow‑up funding round.
Former Alibaba Qwen technical lead Lin Junyang’s AI Lab has secured a new round of financing, with Tencent investing $20 million. The round totals several hundred million dollars and lifts the post‑money valuation to about $2 billion.
High‑profile investors Gaorong Capital and Sequoia China led the round, each contributing $100 million. According to sources, the financing has just closed and Lin is already pursuing a subsequent round.
Investors are willing to back a high valuation largely because of Lin’s track record at Alibaba, where the Qwen series of models entered the global open‑source AI model elite. For a newly established Chinese AI Lab, a $2 billion valuation is exceptionally rare.
Tencent’s involvement aligns with its broader strategy of investing in domestic large‑model developers, including Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Zhipu AI, and it is also participating in DeepSeek’s latest financing.
Lin Junyang, 33, rose rapidly at Alibaba to become the youngest P10 technical executive. Over six years he helped scale model parameters to the trillion‑level and led the release of the Qwen open‑source model family. In October 2025 he plans to form a robotics and embodied‑intelligence team to push models beyond virtual screens into real‑world perception and manipulation.
Signed-in readers can open the original source through BestHub's protected redirect.
This article has been distilled and summarized from source material, then republished for learning and reference. If you believe it infringes your rights, please contactand we will review it promptly.
How this landed with the community
Was this worth your time?
0 Comments
Thoughtful readers leave field notes, pushback, and hard-won operational detail here.