Money

Funding raised

Cumulative disclosed/announced funding. Some figures are rumored or pending. Corporate-platform teams are funded internally and aren't comparable to venture rounds.

Total disclosed funding
$19.6B
across 7 venture-funded labs
Biggest raiser
$7.3B
DeepSeek (深度求索) — rumored/pending
Funded internally
5
Hunyuan team @ Tencent (混元), ByteDance Doubao + Seed (豆包 / Seed), Qwen team @ Alibaba (通义千问 / 通义实验室), Xiaomi MiMo (小米 MiMo), Meituan LongCat (美团龙猫)
1
DeepSeek (深度求索)
Cost-Curve Rebels

Open reasoning models; cost discipline; efficient training.

Rumored/pending first external round: up to 50B yuan (~$7.35B)

$7.35B
rumored / pending
2
Moonshot AI / Kimi (月之暗面)
Long Window

Kimi consumer assistant; long context; open model releases.

$3.9B raised over the past six months; earlier rounds not fully itemized

$3.9B
3
StepFun (阶跃星辰)
Multimodal-to-Device Crew

MSRA-heavy Shanghai lab; multimodal models and heavy training infrastructure, increasingly oriented toward on-device and edge deployment.

>$3.2B cumulative disclosed/announced funding, plus earlier undisclosed rounds

$3.2B
4
Zhipu AI / Z.ai (智谱AI)
Academic-to-Enterprise Pipeline

Tsinghua-origin GLM stack for enterprise, agents, video, and state-linked deployments.

~$2.0B cumulative raised, including $558M IPO proceeds

$2B
5
MiniMax (稀宇科技)
Multimodal Showrunners

Consumer AI, characters, voice/video, and multimodal products.

~$1.8B cumulative disclosed funding, including $619M IPO proceeds

$1.8B
6
Baichuan AI (百川智能)
Healthcare Hard Pivot

Former general LLM startup now oriented around healthcare and medical models.

~$1.0B cumulative funding

$1B
7
01.AI (零一万物)
Frontier Exit

Kai-Fu Lee's startup that left the frontier-pretraining race; its core team was absorbed into Alibaba, leaving an enterprise/archive footprint.

~$300M total known funding

$0.3B
8
Hunyuan team @ Tencent (混元)
Mass-Market Distribution Engine

Tencent's foundation-model stack for WeChat/cloud/games, plus video and 3D.

Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds

Internal
9
ByteDance Doubao + Seed (豆包 / Seed)
Consumer Feedback Flywheel

ByteDance's Doubao app, Seed research, video models, Volcano Engine calls, and on-device agent experiments.

Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds

Internal
10
Qwen team @ Alibaba (通义千问 / 通义实验室)
Open-Model Bazaar

Alibaba Cloud's open model family, Bailian MaaS layer, coding/agent benchmarks, and developer distribution.

Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds

Internal
11
Xiaomi MiMo (小米 MiMo)
Pocket-to-Dashboard Stack

Xiaomi AI Lab's open models tied to device, car, and edge-product ambitions.

Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds

Internal
12
Meituan LongCat (美团龙猫)
Local-Services Dispatch

Efficient MoE models for agent/tool-use and local-services workflows.

Internal platform funding, not comparable to venture rounds

Internal