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Naive AI was valued at $1.42B as of 18 September 2026 (reported). Source: The Information, A Tsinghua professor's stealth LLM startup hits $1.4 billion valuation - $400M raised across three rounds from Tencent, IDG Capital and HSG.
Beijing LLM startup founded in February 2026 by Tsinghua electronic-engineering associate professor Dai Jifeng, previously at Microsoft Research Asia and SenseTime.
Beijing LLM startup founded in February 2026 by Tsinghua electronic-engineering associate professor Dai Jifeng, previously at Microsoft Research Asia and SenseTime. Rather than pretraining from scratch it modifies the architecture of an existing Chinese open-weight model and refines it with mid-training, post-training and reinforcement learning; the first release, also called Naive, is an open-weight model due in September 2026. Fewer than 100 staff after seven months in stealth, and $400M raised across three rounds ($100M, $180M, $120M) from Tencent, IDG Capital and HSG.
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Last updated 18 September 2026. Follow Naive AI in any feed reader to hear when its valuation moves.
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