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Text | Zhou Xinyu

Editor | Su Jianxun Yang Xuan

Intelligence Emergence exclusively learned thatThe AI ​​big model unicorn company Zero One Everything founded by Kai-Fu Lee has completed a new round of financing, with an amount of hundreds of millions of dollarsAccording to people familiar with the matter, the participants in this round of financing includeAn international strategic investment and Southeast Asian consortiumAnd many other institutions.

As of press time, Zero One Everything has not responded to the above news.

Founded in May 2023, Zero One Everything was founded by Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman of Sinovation Ventures and former Global Vice President of Microsoft. The core team members come from companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Baidu.

Today's "Big Model Six Little Tigers" (Zhipu AI, Zero One Everything, Baichuan Intelligence, MiniMax,Dark Side of the Moon, Step Star), is crossing the 20 billion yuan valuation mark at an astonishing speed.

On August 5, 2024, according to Bloomberg, Dark Side of the Moon had just completed a round of financing of more than US$300 million, with a post-investment valuation of up to US$3.3 billion. Not long ago, "Intelligence Emergence" exclusively reported that Baichuan Intelligence, founded by Wang Xiaochuan, was seeking Series B financing at a valuation of 20 billion yuan.

In the eyes of many people in the industry, a valuation of 20 billion yuan represents a threshold.

For the primary market, there are not many investors who can take on this valuation level, and the entry of Internet strategic investment and state-owned capital platforms is inevitable. For example, behind Zhipu AI is the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Association, and behind Baichuan Intelligence are state-owned capitals such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Alibaba and Tencent are almost all on the shareholder list of the "Six Little Tigers".

Of course, looking for money overseas is also an option for many companies. An industry insider once told "Intelligent Emergence" that at least three large-scale unicorns are actively contacting overseas capital, especially Asian capital, because they are not greatly affected by geopolitics.

This time, a well-known Southeast Asian consortium also appeared on the list of shareholders of Zero One Wanwu.

The globalization of financing is, in a sense, one aspect of Zero One Everything’s globalization strategy. As early as March 2023, Kai-Fu Lee positioned Project AI 2.0, the predecessor of Zero One Everything, as a “global company” in his AI Hero post on WeChat Moments.

Nowadays, going overseas has become an unspoken consensus in the AI ​​industry, whether it is seeking larger market space and customers with higher paying capabilities, or verifying products based on overseas technologies.

As a company with distinct global characteristics since day one, in addition to raising funds overseas, Zero One Wanwu has also deployed AI products in both domestic and overseas markets.

On the C-end, Zero One Wanwu’s product strategy is to first verify in overseas markets and then implement in the domestic market.

Previously, Zero One has launched the AI ​​office tool PopAi overseas. According to official data, since PopAi was launched 9 months ago, the product's ROI (return on investment) has been close to 1, and the number of users is nearly 10 million.

With the initial verification in overseas markets, Zero One Everything launched the productivity tool "Wanzhi" in China in May 2024. People familiar with the matter told "Intelligence Emergence" that Zero One Everything has several C-end overseas products in the verification stage and will make localization layout this year.

On the B-side, after a year of building reputation with open source, in 2024, Zero One Everything's large model entered the closed-source commercialization stage, and launched the first closed-source model Yi-Large. At present, Zero One Everything's customer profile also has a distinct global feature. According to reports, many of Yi API's enterprise-level customers are Fortune 500 companies with global operations.

Kai-Fu Lee summed up Zero One Everything's past year as: catching up with the most advanced models in the United States. Now, he thinks that large model manufacturers need to think about how to enter the "long-distance running mode."

TC-PMF (Technology Cost and Product Market Fit) is the result of his thinking over the past year. "Any product that wants to achieve large-scale application must take into account both the technical path and the reasoning cost."

Through the optimization of chip computing level, Infra computing efficiency, and training data quality, according to public reports, on May 21, in the world's authoritative blind test LMSYS list, Yi-Large ranked first among Chinese models in the comprehensive ranking and first in the world in the Chinese list.

However, under the trend of collective price reduction of large models, Zero One Wanwu is one of the few model startups that clearly does not follow the trend.

In Kai-Fu Lee's view, price wars in the large-model field will not only damage the company's profitability, but also be detrimental to the healthy development of the entire industry. The pricing of models needs to be based on their technological value.

Proving the value of technology also puts forward higher requirements for the talent development of model manufacturers. Kai-Fu Lee once publicly pointed out that the competitiveness of model companies = talent quality × computing power. The verification of TC-PMF requires global talents in algorithms, infra, and engineering.

Intelligence Emergence learned from an informed source thatRecently, many senior AI talents in charge of technology and product pipelines from Google, Microsoft and other companies have joined Zero One Everything.

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