NaiveAI, founded by Tsinghua's Dai Jifeng, raises $400M in 7 months betting on post-training
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-09-23
NaiveAI, founded 7 months ago by Tsinghua associate professor Dai Jifeng (70k+ citations, creator of InternVL), has raised $400M across three rounds at a $1.42B valuation from Tencent, Sequoia China, IDG and Matrix Partners.
The bet: skip pre-training. Instead of the capital-heavy from-scratch route taken by DeepSeek and Moonshot, NaiveAI fine-tunes an existing Chinese open-source model — architecture tweaks, mid-training, then RL — cutting iteration costs by an order of magnitude. CMU research supports the undervalued role of mid-training. Long-term target: recursive self-improvement.
Context: the path has precedents — Thinking Machines Lab built on DeepSeek-V3's architecture, and Cursor's Composer-1 shows traces of Zhipu's model. But commercialization pressure is brutal: all Chinese AI models combined earn 10% of OpenAI's annualized revenue. Zhipu made $954M RMB in H1 (86.5% from API), MiniMax $120M. Mistral shows open-source monetization can work ($20M to $400M ARR via private deployment contracts).
Risks: an unresolved IP dispute with MiroMind, and the question of how much differentiation post-training can deliver over someone else's base model.
Related event: Tsinghua Professor's NaiveAI Raises $400M in 7 Months(2 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Bert Chan on His Unconventional Path from Side-Projects to the ALife Institute — BertChakovsky · 2026-11-11
- Stanford's Leskovec Lab hiring postdocs for biology foundation models and agents — jure · 2026-11-11
- nFactorial Ventures throws SF party for Olympiad founders, citing 4000x unicorn odds — pzakin · 2026-11-11
- Databricks' revised Genie agent tells CEO Ali Ghodsi the unvarnished truth — TechCrunch AI · 2026-11-11
- CoreWeave CEO says he canceled his 10b5-1 plan, halting insider selling — firstadopter · 2026-11-11
- Every's Thesis 2027: "Steal like an artist — yoink and twist" what works — every · 2026-11-11