01.AI
01.AI was founded in March 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee and built the open-source Yi model series before pivoting in early 2025 to commercial applications on top of DeepSeek's models, led by its global product PopAI. Most of its LLM training team moved to a joint lab with Alibaba Cloud in January 2025.
Valuation
$1B
Total Raised
$300M+
Yi-Lightning
Text
Closed
MoE flagship API model (Oct 2024). Ranked #6 on Chatbot Arena at launch — joint 3rd among LLM companies. 40% faster inference than prior Yi models. Final model before 01.AI halted pre-training in early 2025.
Context16K
Input
$0.14/1M tokens
Output
$0.14/1M tokens
View Docs ↗
Yi-Coder
Code
Open
Code model (Sep 2024); 1.5B and 9B variants; supports 52 programming languages; 128K context window.
Context128K
Input
Output
View Docs ↗
Yi-1.5
Text
Open
Open-source series (May 2024); 6B–34B variants. Improved coding, math, reasoning, and instruction-following over original Yi.
Context—
Input
Output
View Docs ↗
Yi-VL-34B
Multimodal
Open
34B vision-language model (early 2024). Open-weight multimodal extension of Yi-34B.
Context—
Input
Output
View Docs ↗
Yi-34B
Text
Open
Founding open-source model (Nov 2023). Topped HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard and C-Eval at launch. 200K-token context variant (Yi-34B-200K) also available.
MMLU76.3/100
Context200K
Input
Output
View Docs ↗
Total Raised
$300M+
All rounds
Valuation
$1B
Post-money (approx.)
Last Round
2024
Most recent year
Round Timeline
2023-11
Series A$300M
TencentXiaomiAlibaba CloudSinovation Ventures
2024-08
StrategicUndisclosed
Southeast Asian consortium
AI-powered document workspace targeting global markets. Features chat-with-document, AI presentation generation, and visual understanding. Supports 200+ languages. Primary B2C revenue driver for 01.AI following the company's 2025 pivot away from LLM pre-training.
AI Pioneer Kai-Fu Lee’s Startup Targets Hong Kong IPO Next Year
01.AI Steps Back from Pretraining Frontier Models, Pivots to Enterprise and Sovereign AI
Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI stopped pretraining its own frontier LLMs, choosing instead to build tailored solutions on top of open models such as DeepSeek's for enterprise and government clients in finance, gaming, and legal — and increasingly for "sovereign AI" deployments abroad. Lee said the company was preparing a new funding round and a 2027 IPO.
Is Pursuing AGI Too Ambitious for Chinese AI Startups?
Lee Kai-Fu's 01.AI announces it will stop training large language models, with part of its team joining an Alibaba joint lab — raising questions about whether independent AGI pursuit is viable in China.
Kai-Fu Lee
李开复
Founder & Chairman
