NaiveAI, founded by Dai Jifeng, raises $400M in 7 months at a $1.42B valuation
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-09-23
NaiveAI, founded by Tsinghua associate professor Dai Jifeng (70K+ citations, ex-MSRA, InternVL), has raised $400M across three rounds in just 7 months at a $1.42B valuation, per The Information — with Tencent, Sequoia China, IDG, and Matrix Partners among backers.
- The bet: skip pretraining; fine-tune an existing Chinese open-source base via architecture changes, mid-training, and RL, targeting general models and recursive self-improvement. Iteration cost is reportedly an order of magnitude lower.
- Risks: an unresolved IP/equity dispute with his former venture MiroMind, and dependence on someone else's base model.
- Context: similar paths exist — Thinking Machines' Inkling builds on DeepSeek-V3 with Kimi K2.5 synthetic data; Cursor's Composer-1 allegedly used Zhipu models.
- Market pressure: all Chinese AI models combined earn 10% of OpenAI+Anthropic's revenue (Rhodium estimate); Zhipu's H1 revenue hit ¥954M (86.5% from API), MiniMax $120M. NaiveAI's first open-weights release will test the thesis.
Related event: Tsinghua Professor's NaiveAI Raises $400M in 7 Months(2 posts)→
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