ModelBest Raises Over 5B in Half a Year
智东西 · wechat · 2026-07-15
ModelBest announced a new funding round, with cumulative financing exceeding 50 亿元 in the first half of 2026, reaching a valuation of over 200 亿元, making it one of the highest publicly valued edge intelligence unicorns. Investors include national-level funds, central state-owned enterprises, automakers, and financial institutions, with a notable increase in industrial capital.
The article reviews ModelBest's background: founded in 2022 and incubated by the Tsinghua University Natural Language Processing Lab, its core business is the R&D and industrialization of edge large models. Its MiniCPM series focuses on local deployment and can run on devices like phones, cars, PCs, and robots; MiniCPM5-1B, released in May this year, scored 17.9 in the ArtificialAnalysisIntelligenceIndex, and the author noted its open-source models have surpassed 38 million cumulative downloads.
In terms of commercialization, ModelBest has entered sectors like automotive, mobile, PCs, smart homes, low-altitude aircraft, civil aviation, legal, and embodied intelligence. Automotive is seeing rapid mass production progress, with an expected tens of thousands of cars equipped with its edge models by 2026.
Related event: Mianbi Intelligence Raises Over RMB 5B in H1(2 posts)→
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