On April 23, according to "Jiemian News", Yang Zhilin, the founder of Moonshot, cashed out $40 million by selling his personal shares. According to sources familiar with the matter, the latest round of financing on the dark side of the moon involves some old stock transactions, but Sequoia and other old shareholders have not sold their shares. Another investor in the industry told reporters, "It is rare for the company to cash out so much in the first year of its establishment." ”
The dark side of the moon responded to the "city boundary" on this news, saying: "The above news is not true, the dark side of the moon has previously announced the employee incentive plan, which can be seen in the official information." An institutional shareholder who has invested in the dark side of the moon has also denied the cash-out rumors to the "City Boundary".
With the "long text" function, in February this year, the dark side of the moon, which has just been founded for a year, won a huge financing: at a pre-investment valuation of $1.5 billion, it leveraged $800 million in investment - the vast majority of which came from Alibaba. After the completion of the transaction, the post-investment valuation of the dark side of the moon is about 2.5 billion US dollars (equivalent to 18 billion yuan), becoming the unicorn with the highest valuation in the domestic large-scale model arena.
But behind this "luxury" financing, there has been a lot of fog. According to market news, the dark side of the moon sold 40% of its shares to Ali at one time. As a star company, the rapid "fire sale" of so many shares has sparked discussions about the operational independence of the dark side of the future month.
Previously, "City Boundary" had learned from a senior partner of a VC that the "marriage" between Kimi and Alibaba was led by Zhang Yutong, managing partner of GSR Ventures, in Singapore. "Alibaba's $800 million isn't all cash. As far as I know, the actual amount of capital contributed is less than 600 million, part of which will be settled by the computing power provided by Alibaba Cloud. ”
In addition, according to a VC industry veteran, the latest revelation to the "City Boundary" that the Ali computing power that Kimi urgently needs has not yet entered the "cash" stage. According to its understanding, the current controllable computing power of Kimi is still stuck at 3,000 NVIDIA H cards (the flagship data center chip launched by NVIDIA, the main products on the market are H100 and H800).
According to the market, before completing the transaction with Alibaba, Kimi's computing power mainly uses bytes of volcanic clouds. "With 3,000 computing power clusters, it is difficult to run a better large model. As a comparison, according to Meta's disclosure, its early open-source models Llama and Llama 2 were trained on a computing cluster built on 16,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and the recently released Llama 3 is a computing cluster built on 49,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
In addition to trading equity with Alibaba, the recent personnel changes around the core stakeholders of the dark side of the moon, as well as the news of Yang Zhilin's personal "cash-out", have also become suspicious.
According to a recent report by "Tencent Deep Web", as the leader of the transaction between the dark side of the moon and Alibaba, Zhang Yutong has recently resigned from GSR and will join the dark side of the moon. At present, we are in the "transition period" of serving as an advisor and post-investment support in the fund.
The above-mentioned veteran revealed to the "City Boundary" that there have long been rumors in the industry that Zhang Yutong will resign from GSR and join the dark side of the moon. As early as mid-2023, Zhang Yutong told people in Singapore that the future will be "all in" the dark side of the moon.
The industry believes that Zhang Yutong's core role in the dark side of the moon is to "directly raise the level" of the valuation of a company that has just been established for one year and is full of unknown computing power reserves, so that the dark side of the moon has entered the first echelon of the valuation and influence of the large model.
According to media reports: In June 2023, the dark side of the moon completed an angel round of financing of 2 billion yuan, with investors including Sequoia China, Zhen Fund, Today Capital, etc. In July of the same year, the dark side of the moon completed another A1 round of financing, led by Meituan Dragon Ball. In February, a round of financing led by Alibaba pushed the valuation of the dark side of the moon to $2.5 billion.
The valuation of the dark side of the moon has soared, making many investment institutions feel unattainable.
Relevant people told the "City Boundary" that compared with the financing of star start-ups that mostly choose "small steps and fast running", the financing of the dark side of the moon directly "skipped several rounds" and entered the stage of "stable valuation" in one step. In this round, the company's story is basically fixed, and it is difficult for the valuation to continue to rise, and it is basically in a state of "waiting for exit".
But there are many institutions in the market that still covet the dark side of the moon, "like wolves". Even if the AI track is facing problems such as "difficulty in exiting", for many investors, "there is only one opportunity left, and it is uncomfortable to invest in, but if you miss it, you can't get in." ”
Previously, according to market news, the $2.5 billion valuation pushed by Ali was "dissuaded" from Meituan, Dragon Ball, Xiaohongshu and other major companies that hoped to continue to invest in the new round.
So, while it's not uncommon for the company's founders to cash out large sums of money to "improve their lives" after raising funds, the people said that if the $40 million amount is true, it is obviously higher than the industry norm — but it cannot be ruled out that Yang Zhilin personally transferred his old shares to new related investors.
Zhang Yutong's withdrawal this time also brought shock to Jinshajiang. The above-mentioned person said: Zhu Xiaohu and Zhang Yutong have begun to have differences in investment concepts in recent years.
According to him, in the second half of 2022, Zhu Xiaohu expressed his intention of "retirement" to a group of senior investors and friends at a high-end party in Singapore, saying that he "doesn't want to do it anymore". In the past two years, GSR's star investment projects have decreased significantly compared with the golden period. In March this year, Zhu Xiaohu talked about the "uselessness of AI" in an interview with "Tencent Technology".
Compared with Zhu Xiaohu, who is moving towards "Buddhism" investment, Zhang Yutong is more inclined to continue to "fight", "but everyone has their own advantages, and no one can do without anyone."
After the news of Zhang Yutong's departure from GSR to join the dark side of the moon came out, relevant sources revealed to the "City Boundary": Legend has it that the LP of GSR has a very big opinion on Zhang Yutong's resignation. "Generally speaking, the existence of the fund is locked with the managing partner, and it is not easy for the partner to leave easily. ”
And Zhu Xiaohu's latest speech in the circle of friends is intriguing, "As an investor, the GP's fiduciary duty to LPs, and as a company director, the fiduciary duty to shareholders are high-voltage lines that cannot be touched!
Previously, according to the "City Boundary", Zhang Yutong had a relationship with the founding team of the dark side of the moon. Not only are Yang Zhilin and Zhang Yutong alumni of Tsinghua University, but as early as when Yang Zhilin first started his business, Zhang Yutong became his "Bole" on the investment road. In 2016, Yang Zhilin, who was still studying for a doctorate in the United States, founded the intelligent marketing SaaS service company "Circular Intelligence", and returned to China after graduating from his doctorate in 2019 and devoted himself to it.
In the early days of Circular Intelligence, it was Zhang Yutong, then the managing partner of GSR Ventures, who promoted the angel round of financing of Circular Intelligence, and GSR has also participated in multiple rounds of follow-up financing of Circular Intelligence since then.
In December 2021, when Circular Intelligence completed a new round of financing led by Boyu Investment and Sequoia China, Zhang Yutong publicly said: "Circular Intelligence's products have realized the digitization of the sales process, and I hope that the company will do better and better in the field of technology empowering people." ”
According to public information, the main business of Circular Intelligence is concentrated in the fields of intelligent marketing services, and the target markets include banking, insurance, securities, automobiles, real estate, retail, education and training, Internet services and other fields. In 2021, long before the outbreak of the large model market, Circular Intelligence announced that it would cooperate with Huawei and release the first 100 billion Chinese large language model "Pangu".
Among the core members of the dark side of the moon, co-founder and CTO Zhang Yutao and co-founder Zhou Xinyu were also founding members of Yang Zhilin during the period of circular intelligence.
And now, in the face of the wealth and interests "rolled up" by the dark side of the moon, Zhu Xiaohu's dissatisfaction seems to be powerless to change anything.
Author | Dong Wenshu
Edit | Li Yuan
Operations | Liu Shan