Chinese AI Unicorn Baichuan Closes Series A Round, Heart Capital Invests | HeartStar PORTFOLIO
Among the investors in this round are tech heavyweights including Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi, with total funding reaching $300 million.
Recently, domestic large model unicorn Baichuan announced the completion of its A1 strategic funding round, with Heart Capital participating as an investor in this round. The round attracted major tech players including Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi, raising $300 million.
Prior to this, Baichuan had completed a $50 million angel round, bringing its total funding to $350 million. Founded on April 10, 2023, Baichuan achieved unicorn status just six months after its establishment — the fastest ascent to unicorn for any domestic large model startup.
Yan Han, founding partner of Heart Capital, commented: "We're very optimistic about the massive market potential and era-defining opportunity for AI large models and applications in China. Baichuan has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in team building, product technology, fundraising, industry resources, and commercial execution. Congratulations to Chuan, Liyun, and the entire team!"
Baichuan was founded by Chuan Wang, former CEO of Sogou. Its core team comprises top AI talent from Sogou, Google, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Microsoft, ByteDance, and other tech companies. Currently, Baichuan has over 170 employees, with nearly 70% holding master's degrees or higher, and over 80% in R&D roles.
Supported by top-tier technical talent and substantial capital, Baichuan has maintained an astonishing pace of large model development. Within six months, it released four open-source, commercially available large models — Baichuan-7B/13B and Baichuan2-7B/13B — and two closed-source models, Baichuan-53B and Baichuan2-53B, averaging one new model every 28 days.
Baichuan hasn't just led the industry in development speed; it's also achieved top-tier model performance. Its two open-source models, Baichuan-7B/13B, ranked highly on multiple authoritative benchmarks and have been downloaded over six million times. Baichuan2-13B achieved comprehensive, absolute dominance over LLaMA2 across major evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, CMMLU, MedQA, and USMLE, leading the open-source community toward an era of Chinese open-source large models.
On August 31, Baichuan became the first among eight companies to pass national filing under the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services — and the only large model startup founded this year among that group. On September 25, it opened Baichuan2-53B API access, formally entering the B2B sector and kicking off commercialization.
After six months of development, Baichuan has already demonstrated industry-leading technical competitiveness and talent appeal. Alongside this funding announcement, Baichuan has officially launched its 2024 campus recruitment drive and the "Starlight Program." This recruitment effort targets students both domestically and internationally, covering multiple cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, across numerous universities.
The Starlight Program is Baichuan's specialized campus recruitment initiative targeting elite technical talent globally. Positions span multiple key AI technology directions including natural language processing, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and infrastructure engineering, aimed at finding elite talent with technical ideals and passion for AI.
Heart Capital was founded in 2022 by Yan Han, formerly a founding partner at Lightspeed, as a China-focused early-stage venture capital fund specializing in technology and digitalization. The Heart Capital team consists primarily of founding partners, the CFO, and core investors from Lightspeed, alongside seasoned industry investors from Cainiao and Baidu. The team's past investments include leading the Series A in Full Truck Alliance (NYSE: YMM), Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV, HK: 09868), as well as investments in FinVolution (NYSE: FINV), 06810.HK, RoboSense, World Logistics, LandSpace, Lanhu, Micro-nano Starry Sky, Starfield, and others. Rooted in China with a global outlook, Heart Capital is dedicated to finding world leaders who will disrupt the future. The firm champions the value of "people" and "heart," and looks forward to accompanying more young Chinese entrepreneurs onto the world stage.
