Tsinghua Zhu Jun's Large Model Company Secures Funding Again, Will Launch AI Toolset This Year


AI startup Instinct, founded a year ago and led by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, raised a $250M Series B, bringing total funding to $350M at a $2.5B valuation, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. Launched by Spear Street Technology, it builds AI agents that manage users' lives across apps.....
Ollama enables local execution of open-source LLMs with a single command, freeing developers from API keys and high costs. On July 9, it raised $88M led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton, Theory Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz, 8VC's Alex Kolicich, with participation from Docker founder Solomon Hykes, ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz, and GIMP co-creator.....
Manifold Space, founded by Wu Wei, a former executive from SenseTime, recently completed a funding round worth hundreds of millions of yuan. The investors include China National New Capital Fund, Yifeng Capital under Temasek, Beijing Automotive Industrial Investment, and Xineng Venture Capital. Existing shareholders also made additional investments. The company has completed six funding rounds within just one year of its establishment, with a total amount of nearly 1 billion yuan, rapidly rising to the forefront of the industry.
Manifold AI, a one-year-old world-model startup, has secured hundreds of millions of yuan in funding from new investors including China Reform Fund, InnoVen Capital, BAIC Capital, and Core Energy Venture Capital, while four existing shareholders oversubscribed. Its rapid growth in the AI race has earned strong capital recognition.....
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek plans to conduct its first large-scale financing round, aiming to raise about 50 billion yuan (approximately 7.4 billion US dollars), with an estimated valuation of 350 to 400 billion yuan after the funding. The company has gained global attention with its V3 and R1 models, changing the perception of China's capabilities in large model development.