Tencent Ali Meituan teamed up to cast a unicorn

A large model company, attracting three Internet giants to invest in the shares, quickly grew into a unicorn.

Recently, Zhipu AI was rumored to have completed the B4 round of financing, with investors including Tencent War Investment, Alibaba Cloud War Investment, etc., with a post-investment valuation of about 1 billion US dollars.

According to other sources, the market valuation of Zhipu AI has been around 12-14 billion yuan, which is one of the fastest start-up companies with a valuation of more than 10 billion yuan in China.

Although Zhipu AI did not comment, Tencent Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group have confirmed their participation in the investment.

Among them, Alibaba replied, "Alibaba Cloud hopes to make friends with big model companies and build a big model ecology, and we have indeed invested in Zhipu AI." ”

And this is also after Meituan, Zhipu AI less than two months apart, once again recognized by Internet giants.

Only four years after its establishment, it has successively received investment from three major Internet giants, and at the same time has worked closely with 360 NetEase Meituan and other large manufacturers.

Originating from Tsinghua, Tsinghua University is the fourth largest shareholder

As one of the origins of domestic artificial intelligence research, Tsinghua University has a high photo rate.

Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Wang Xiaochuan and other bigwigs who are at the head of the big model boom are all Tsinghua students.

At the same time, Tsinghua's entrepreneurial team also occupies half of the "big model" field: first-class technology, power-law intelligence, wisdom spectrum AI, Lingxin intelligence, Zhiyuan technology, Shenyan technology, face-wall intelligence, Shenshu technology and so on.

Zhipu AI is even more closely related to Tsinghua University.

According to public information, Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd., the industrial and commercial entity of Zhipu AI, was registered in June 2019 and is transformed from the technical achievements of the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (KEG) of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University.

The chief scientist of Zhipu AI is Professor Tang Jie of the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, and he is also the leader of KEG Lab. Among the core team, Chairman Liu Debing is a disciple of Academician Gao Wen of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, President Wang Shaolan is a Tsinghua Innovation Leading Doctor, and CEO Zhang Peng graduated from Tsinghua Computer Department.

Among them, Liu Debing's total shareholding ratio is about 19.49%, which is the actual controller of Zhipu AI.

It is worth mentioning that most of the team members of Zhipu AI have participated in the collaborative project "Wudao" between Tsinghua University and KLCII.

In March and June 2021, Professor Tang Jie, then Academic Vice Dean of KLCII, as the director of the "Wudao" Model Technical Committee, led the team to release the mainland's first ultra-large-scale intelligent models "Wudao 1.0" and "Wudao 2.0".

According to the information of Tianyancha App, Professor Tang Jie directly holds 12.6% of the shares and is the second largest shareholder of the company.

As a university technology transformation project, Tsinghua University holds about 7.29% of the shares of Zhipu AI, making it the fourth largest shareholder.

In addition, the Tsinghua University Education Foundation also indirectly holds a small stake in Zhipu AI through investment institutions such as Dachen Caizhi.

It is worth mentioning that KLCII, which maintains a close working relationship with Zhipu AI, holds about 1.52% of the former's shares.

Excellent results, continue to harvest the cooperation of large manufacturers

Originating from Tsinghua and with the research and development experience of the "Wudao" model, the development of Zhipu AI can be described as smooth.

Since 2020, Zhipu AI has begun to focus on the research of the underlying algorithm of large models, and is committed to creating a new generation of general models of cognitive intelligence.

In August 2022, GLM-130B, a bilingual ultra-large-scale pre-training model developed by KEG Laboratory of Tsinghua University and Zhipu AI, was officially launched.

It is worth mentioning that the GLM-130B released by Zhipu AI has outperformed GPT-3 in multiple public evaluation sets in September 2022.

In November of the same year, the Stanford University Large Model Center conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 30 mainstream large models around the world, and Zhipu AI's GLM-130B was the only large model selected in Asia.

The evaluation results show that key indicators such as GLM-130B accuracy are close to or equal to the large models of OpenAI, Google Brain, Microsoft and NVIDIA, and more than 1,000 institutions in 70 countries around the world have applied for use.

With its excellent performance, Zhipu AI has also been evaluated as the "most OpenAI temperament and level" AI company in China.

According to relevant reports, a Microsoft algorithm engineer said, "In Silicon Valley, Zhipu AI's GLM should be the most recognized Chinese big language model by leading technology companies." ”

Since then, Zhipu AI has launched the dialogue model ChatGLM and the open-source single-card model ChatGLM-6B, and created a large model product matrix, including the high-efficiency code model CodeGeeX, the high-precision text and graph generation model CogView, and the multimodal dialogue language model VisualGLM-6B.

At the end of August this year, as one of the first eight large model companies to pass the filing, Zhipu AI launched the generative AI assistant Zhipu Qingyan.

Zhang Peng, CEO of Zhapu AI, mentioned in an interview that when in the laboratory, the team can serve B-end customers, and the laboratory can also support itself. "When the company was formed, almost the entire lab team was 'translational' out. That's why some people say that we came out with technology, talent team, and even customers. ”

Therefore, riding on the boom of large models and relying on its excellent technical strength, Zhipu AI has successively received the cooperation of many large manufacturers, such as 360, NetEase Youdao, Meituan, Lenovo, Kingsoft WPS, etc., and established strategic cooperative relations with Bamboo Intelligence and Shuguang to promote the application and commercialization of AI technology.

For cooperation with all parties, Zhang Peng said that Zhipu AI has always adhered to its own vision: to make machines think like humans and realize the concept of Model as a Service (MaaS). It is hoped that with the close cooperation of all parties, the large model technology will obtain more extensive and in-depth landing scenarios and empower more industries.

It has been invested by the three giants and actively invests abroad

Perhaps it is precisely because of Tsinghua's background and excellent performance that Zhipu AI continues to be sought after in the capital market.

Since its establishment, Zhipu AI has completed 5 consecutive rounds of financing in 4 years.

Among them, in August 2019, China Science and Technology Innovation Star became an early angel investor of Zhipu AI; A year later, he completed the A round of financing and received investment institutions such as Dachen Caizhi, Huakon Fund, and Jiangmen Venture Capital; Another year later, Legend Capital and Qiming Venture Capital jointly led the Series B financing of Zhipu AI.

Source: Tianyan Cha