Startups Baichuan, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax are considered the hope for China to access modern technology like ChatGPT. Of these, Baichuan has just completed a new round of fundraising, raising its valuation to about 1.8 billion USD. Thus, all four names above meet the criteria of a technology unicorn, valued at over 1 billion USD.

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Baichuan founder Wang Xiaochuan. Photo: Sohu

The group has been dubbed China's "four new AI tigers," in contrast to the four "old" AI dragons — SenseTime, Megvii, CloudWalk Technology, and Yitu Technology — which focused primarily on facial and image recognition technology.

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, Big Tech and Chinese startups have been racing to attract users to generative AI services. According to government data, about 200 large language models (LLMs) — the technology that underpins generative AI — have been introduced in China to date.

Baichuan was founded a year ago by Wang Xiaochuan, who founded Baidu’s biggest rival Sogou before selling it to Tencent. A team of Wang’s longtime aides and former Sogou CEO Ru Liyun are leading Baichuan. The startup has released three versions of its AI model so far, and claims its latest version surpasses OpenAI’s GPT4 in Chinese.

In October 2023, Baichuan announced that it had raised $300 million from backers including Tencent, Xiaomi, and Alibaba. That same month, Zhipu AI revealed that it had raised 2.5 billion yuan ($347 million) since the beginning of 2023 from Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, as well as venture capitalists including GL Ventures and HongShan. The money will be used to further develop its platform models and build an industrial ecosystem. At the time, Zhipu AI was valued at more than $1.3 billion.

Zhipu AI was founded in 2019 based on research from Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group. CEO Zhang Peng graduated with a PhD in Computer Science there.

Two other new “tigers” — Moonshot AI and MiniMax — due in 2023 and 2021, respectively — have both seen their valuations recently rise to around $2.5 billion.

Moonshot AI raised $1 billion in a funding round in February, according to Chinese media. Its chatbot Kimi, built on its own LLM and upgraded last month, can process 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt. Meanwhile, MiniMax is looking to raise at least $600 million in a new round led by Alibaba, valuing the company at more than $2.5 billion, according to Bloomberg .

(According to SCMP)