Naive AI, a Beijing-based large language model startup founded in February 2026 by Tsinghua University professor Dai Jifeng, has raised $400 million across three funding rounds, reaching a $1.42 billion valuation. Backers include Tencent, IDG Capital, MPCi and HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China).
Rather than pretraining a model from scratch, the company, which has fewer than 100 employees, is building its first LLM on top of an existing Chinese open-weight model and refining it through reinforcement learning. It plans to release the model as a free, open-weight download as early as this month.
The rapid valuation follows a pattern among Chinese AI labs, which command far higher valuation-to-revenue multiples than their US counterparts: Moonshot trades near 50x and DeepSeek near 163x, compared with roughly 34x for OpenAI and 21x for Anthropic. Dai also faces an unresolved dispute with his former employer MiroMind over intellectual property and technology licensing.