Lab profileCorporate platform team
ByteDance Doubao + Seed (豆包 / Seed)
Consumer Feedback FlywheelTotem · Seed & sprout
Known for: ByteDance's Doubao app, Seed research, video models, Volcano Engine calls, and on-device agent experiments.
ByteDance's Doubao/Seed foundation-model org (Beijing + Bay Area). Wu Yonghui (吴永辉, ex-Google DeepMind VP) joined as Seed lead February 2025; recent coverage emphasizes Doubao's consumer feedback loop, Seedance video, Volcano Engine token share, and ByteDance's experiments around phone/on-device agent access.
Doubao 1.5 ProDoubao 2.0Seedance 2.0 (video)Doubao-Seed-CodeSeed1.5-VL
Valuation
Parent-owned
ByteDance-owned team; no standalone lab valuation used
Funding raised
Internal
Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds
Key people
- GUO Daya (郭达雅)Researcher, DeepSeek (reportedly departed for ByteDance Seed early 2026)
- DING Ming (丁铭)Now at ByteDance Seed (formerly Zhipu)
- HUANG Wenhao (黄文灏)ByteDance large-model team; former 01.AI technical co-founder / VP Algorithms
- YU Bowen (郁博文)Now at ByteDance Seed (joined March 12, 2026 as post-training lead, Visual Model & Multimodal Interaction Team)
- WU Yonghui (吴永辉)Head of Seed foundational research, ByteDance (since February 2025)
- ZHU Wenjia (朱文佳)Leads Doubao large-model applications, ByteDance
- WANG Mingxuan (王明轩)Senior Researcher, ByteDance Seed; Co-Director SIA Lab (joint w/ Tsinghua AIR)
- ZHOU Chang (周畅)Multimodal Interaction & World-Models lead, ByteDance Seed (joined September 2024)
Notable alumni & departures
News & coverage
Notable recent updates, newest first.
ISR 1 hour
RevenueMay 21, 2026
Doubao
Seedance 2.0 video AI model achieves commercial viability with high user willingness to pay.