A Tsinghua Professor’s Stealth LLM Startup Hits $1.4 Billion Valuation

A Chinese AI model startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor has reached a valuation of over $1.4 billion after raising $400 million in three funding rounds from investors including Tencent. The Beijing-based company, Naive AI, is preparing to release its first large language model as early as this month. The startup plans to release the model as an open-weight model, similar to offerings from DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Alibaba, which can be downloaded for free and customized.

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