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

A secretive Chinese AI model startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor is now valued at more than $1.4 billion, after raising $400 million in three funding rounds from investors including Tencent, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Beijing-based Naive AI is preparing to release its first large language model as early as this month, joining the country’s fierce LLM competition as a newcomer, according to the person. The startup plans to release it as an open-weight model, similar to offerings from DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba that people can download for free and customize to their liking.