The Fundraising Stories of China's "Six Little Tigers": Six Paths, Six Lives

@Jing Liu @Yunxiao Guo

This week, over the span of two days, Zhipu AI and MiniMax both filed for IPOs on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The long-drawn-out China LLM financing saga, three years in the making, has reached a new inflection point.

One is billed as "the world's first LLM stock," the other as "the world's first global AGI stock." That the distinction has to be drawn so finely speaks to the velocity and crowding of this narrative. The past two days have already seen a saturation of fundraising PR stories, so elsewhere won't retrace the entire tale beat by beat.

The angle we offer is this: Many say investing is the monetization of one's cognition, but it's equally the monetization of values and personal taste. If we look back at the financing stories of China's "Six Little Tigers" of large models, beyond a few chance occurrences, there's a striking coupling between each company's founders and their corresponding investors.

Take Zhipu AI. Tang Jie and Zhang Peng's labels are: academic pedigree, grand ambition. Chronologically, Zhipu was founded in 2019, the earliest of the six. But it initially worked on mapping natural language processing and knowledge graphs, so CASSTAR, an early investor, probably didn't anticipate how the story would unfold.

This led to an awkward episode: despite CASSTAR's outsized 40 million yuan investment, they partially exited in subsequent rounds.

Zhipu AI's other early investors included Fortune Venture Capital, Legend Capital, and Qiming Venture Partners — all carrying a certain "properly pedigreed" aura. Among them, Legend Capital manages the Social Security Fund's Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund; and even Qiming, often seen as having "dollar fund" sensibilities, is among the most aggressively localized firms, also managing Beijing's AI Industry Investment Fund, which participated in Zhipu's financing.

MiniMax tells a different story. By currency, it was broadly built with dollar fund support — whether Yunqi Capital, Mingshi Venture Capital, Hillhouse Capital, or miHoYo, Oasis Capital, and others. The reason many later drew comparisons between MiniMax and Kimi was precisely this similarity. When Alibaba made its most aggressive bets on Chinese LLM investments, the fundraising rivalry between these two was at its most intense.

But an important difference between MiniMax and Kimi is that the former was founded more than two years earlier. So for numerous VCs, the possibility of backing both was hardly comparable. Beyond that, there's the temperamental distinction between Yan Junjie and Yang Zhilin: Multiple investors in both camps have told us the difference, simplified, comes down to whether you believe more in an "entrepreneur" or a young talent — though their age gap is merely three or four years.

The former camp includes Hillhouse's Li Liang, Yunqi's Chen Yu, Mingshi's Huang Mingming and Xia Ling, Matrix Partners' Huadong Wang, Oasis Capital's Jinjian Zhang, and others. The latter includes Monolith's Xi Cao, ZhenFund's Yusen Dai, Gaorong Capital's Rui Han, Source Code Rhythm's Yungang Huang, and BlueRun Ventures' Tianyu Zhu. There's also Sequoia Capital China's Qingsheng Zheng, who bet on both. But Sequoia may not say much on this question: beyond 01.AI and Baichuan, they invested in the other four.

In an April 2024 podcast, a conversation between Cao Xi and Yang Zhilin illustrated something. Yang said the name Moonshot had two references: a Pink Floyd album, and a Kubrick film (also the namesake of Monolith), so he felt an immediate connection upon first meeting Cao. Cao, for his part, said that when he first heard "Moonshot," it struck him as "exactly what a VC should invest in."

Another detail: In June 2024, at a media roundtable where Kimi and MiniMax investors sat together, a small coincidence emerged — none of the Kimi investors present could code; all the MiniMax investors could.

Of course this is just a detail, not necessarily meaningful.

To many, Kimi is a more archetypal dollar VC story. Its emergence and acceleration partly traces to Wang Huiwen's Light-Year Beyond. After Wang's sudden health crisis forced many VCs to pivot, they turned to Kimi, then valued at just a few hundred million dollars. So to some extent, Yang Zhilin inherited Wang Huiwen's narrative, and Wang himself later firmly backed Kimi.

01.AI and Baichuan each have their own character. Kai-Fu Lee declared his intention to build a Chinese LLM shortly after the 2023 Lunar New Year. But this story more resembles a super-project of Sinovation Ventures, directly drawing on the firm's years of accumulated AI talent and technical networks. In mid-2024, 01.AI announced investment from "a certain international strategic investor" and a "Southeast Asian conglomerate." But the story seemed to go nowhere after that: for the year and a half since, whether any new financing progress has been made remains unknown to us.

As for Baichuan, Wang Xiaoxuan initially raised $50 million in seed capital through his personal network, then seemingly skipped the financial investor stage entirely: its A1 round of $300 million brought together tech giants Tencent, Alibaba, and Xiaomi; in July 2024 it completed a 5 billion yuan Series A with state capital from Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen all participating. But no further financing news has followed since.

According to elsewhere's understanding, among financial funds, Joy Capital's Erhai Liu, Xin Capital's Yan Han, and Redpoint China participated in Baichuan's investment. Those familiar with the VC industry will roughly understand the generational and spiritual connections between these names.

Among the six, Stepfun's situation is somewhat particular. Shanghai International Capital is their most important backer, with relatively limited financial investor participation; Five Source Capital and Qiming Venture Partners joined the Series B.

Among the Six Little Tigers, some funds placed multiple bets. Shunwei, for instance, invested in nearly all of them. Partner Tian Cheng once candidly told us that in the early days, it was difficult to see clearly — whether the thing or the person. But at most firms, even when they invested in multiple companies, different partners with different styles typically led each deal.

At Sequoia, for example, Kimi and MiniMax were led by Zheng Qingsheng, while Zhipu was driven by current investment partner Shanshan Guo, who specializes in growth-stage investments. IDG, which also invested in both Kimi and MiniMax, had a similar division of labor.

Of course, some of the above inevitably involves post-hoc attribution. Specific investment decisions may also contain factual discrepancies. But broadly speaking, the logic holds.

The most captivating thing about investing is of course "picking right," but more captivating still is picking what you believe should be picked. From this perspective, the Six Little Tigers' financing stories, for the investors who participated in them, represent something of a fitting outcome for each.

We might push this observation further. Imagine: if Kimi also goes public one day, would the photo of its bell-ringing ceremony look markedly different from Zhipu's and MiniMax's?

Cover image: Unsplash