Honorable mentions
Baichuan
While lots of its competitors chase scale and expansive application ranges, Baichuan AI, founded by industry veteran Wang Xiaochuan (the founding father of Sogou) in April 2023, is targeted on the domestic Chinese market, targeting sectors like medical assistance and health care.Â
With a valuation over $2 billion after its newest round of fundraising, Baichuan is currently amongst the largest AI startups in China.
Minimax
Founded by AI veteran Yan Junjie, Minimax is best known for its product Talkie, a companion chatbot available around the globe. The platform provides various characters users can chat with for emotional support or entertainment, and it had much more downloads last yr than leading competitor chatbot platform Character.ai.Â
Chinese media outlet 36Kr reported that Minimax’s revenue in 2024 was around $70 million, making it probably the most successful consumer-facing Chinese AI startups in the worldwide market.Â
Moonshot
Moonshot is best known for constructing Kimi, the second-most-popular AI chatbot in China, just after ByteDance’s Doubao, with over 13 million users. Released in 2023, Kimi supports input lengths of over 200,000 characters, making it a preferred alternative amongst students, white-collar staff, and others who routinely need to work with long chunks of text.
Founded by Yang Zhilin, a renowned AI researcher who studied at Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon University, Moonshot is backed by big tech corporations, including Alibaba, and top enterprise capital firms. The corporate is valued at around $3 billion but is reportedly scaling back on its foundational model research in addition to overseas product development plans, as key people leave the corporate.
