Lin Junyang, the creator of Alibaba's Qwen AI models, is raising funding for a new AI lab with a valuation target of around $2 billion. According to sources, Gaorong Capital and HongShan (Sequoia China) are in talks to invest, with the funding round expected to be several hundred million dollars. Negotiations are ongoing, the final valuation could change, and the lab's name hasn't been announced yet.
A $2 billion valuation for a Chinese AI startup with no product is nearly unprecedented. The reason Lin can command that price tag: during his three years at Alibaba, he built Qwen into one of the world's leading open source AI model families — especially the low-cost small models that have become hugely popular with global developers. In early March, Lin publicly announced his departure on X (formerly Twitter) before Alibaba made it official, a rare open break. After he left, Alibaba merged the Qwen R&D team with other key AI operations into a new business unit directly under CEO Wu Yongming and notably pivoted toward a closed-source commercial strategy.
Comparable stories in the US are even more absurd: former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's SSI got a $5 billion valuation three months after founding; former CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab hit $10 billion in its first round. But multiple Chinese investors told The Information that new AI labs in China face bigger uncertainties: high valuations in the US partly bet on an eventual acquisition by a big tech company — a logic that doesn't hold in China yet. Plus, with US chip export controls tightening, just getting enough computing power is a hurdle.