By LI Jingya

Baichuan AI has secured over US$300 million (2.2 billion yuan) in Series A1 funding, with participation from tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.

Baichuan is now recruiting domestic and international students, offering positions in key areas like natural language processing, computer vision and reinforcement learning.

After the A1 round and an additional US$50 million in angel investment, Baichuan AI’s total funding has reached US$350 million. 

Insiders close to Baichuan told Jiemian News that the company’s valuation now exceeds US$1 billion, entering the ranks of technology unicorns and setting a record for the fastest unicorn status achieved by a domestic large-scale model startup.

Reports suggest LEI Jun, founder of smartphone Xiaomi, played a pivotal role in Baichuan’s recent funding via Xiaomi Group and Shunwei Capital. Market rumors indicate that Baichuan is now raising funds in an A3 round, with more investments from Shunwei and Xiaomi.

Established in April by WANG Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, Baichuan is focused on creating China’s version of OpenAI’s fundamental large models and AI applications. The team consists of more than 170 members, with over 80 percent being research and development specialists, including Wang’s former associates from Sogou and experts from prominent tech firms.

Formed only six months ago, has introduced new large models more or less monthly.

Generative AI startups are predominantly valued at over US$1 billion in the United States, while in China, companies like Wang’s and other Tsinghua University-affiliated language model firms maintain high valuations. The investment focus in generative AI leans toward the business-to-business (B2B) sector.