01.AI’s efforts to raise fresh funding comes amid the ongoing tensions between the US and China over technology. Credit: William Potter/Shutterstock.

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup 01.AI is looking to raise $200m (1.4bn Yuan) in new investment, reports Reuters citing sources.

The AI company, which was founded by Lee Kai-fu earlier this year, aims to raise more funding from US dollar-based investors.

Go deeper with GlobalData

Data Insights

The gold standard of business intelligence.

Find out more

Related Company Profiles

View all

Along with larger companies such as Meta and Alibaba, 01.AI is one of several Chinese businesses that have opened, or plan to publish, their large language models (LLM) for public usage.

LLM are trained on vast quantities of data to generate text and content in response to prompts.

It powers technologies such as the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which was launched by OpenAI over a year ago.

Last month, 01.AI achieved a valuation of over $1bn in less than eight months following a funding round joined by Alibaba Cloud.

How well do you really know your competitors?

Access the most comprehensive Company Profiles on the market, powered by GlobalData. Save hours of research. Gain competitive edge.

Company Profile – free sample

Thank you!

Your download email will arrive shortly

Not ready to buy yet? Download a free sample

We are confident about the unique quality of our Company Profiles. However, we want you to make the most beneficial decision for your business, so we offer a free sample that you can download by submitting the below form

By GlobalData
Visit our Privacy Policy for more information about our services, how we may use, process and share your personal data, including information of your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Our services are intended for corporate subscribers and you warrant that the email address submitted is your corporate email address.

Requests for comments on the latest funding efforts were not answered by the company.

The AI startup has also launched its open-source LLM, called Yi-34B, which is claimed to perform better in terms of reading comprehension, coding skills, and common-sense reasoning than Meta’s Llama2 model.

In early November 2023, Yi-34B was placed at the top of the list for pre-trained base LLMs by Hugging Face, which keeps leaderboards for the best-performing LLMs in several categories.

01.AI’s efforts to raise fresh funding comes amid the ongoing tensions between the US and China over technology.

The company has stockpiled NVIDIA chips in case the US imposes additional restrictions on exporting technology to China.

In a TV interview with Bloomberg in November 2023, Lee stated that 01.AI purchased enough AI chips to last about 18 months, but he was dubious about China’s ability to produce the technology domestically.

According to research company GlobalData’s predictions, limited access to high-end chips will prevent Chinese AI companies from competing with their US counterparts in 2024.