Meet Yang Zhilin: Moonshot AI founder builds business in the mould of ByteDance, OpenAI

Big bets made by Alibaba, Tencent and other investors on Yang Zhilin’s leadership have boosted Moonshot AI’s valuation to US$3.3 billion

Reading Time:3 minutes

Moonshot AI founder and chief executive Yang Zhilin. Photo: Weibo

Published: 9:00am, 7 Aug 2024

Moonshot AI has emerged as the highest-valued unicorn among mainland China’s four new artificial intelligence (AI) tigers, burnishing the reputation of 31-year-old founder and chief executive Yang Zhilin as the country’s most sought-after entrepreneur in this nascent industry.

After receiving initial major backing from Alibaba Group Holding, Beijing-based Moonshot AI has seen its valuation soar to US$3.3 billion on the back of Tencent Holdings’ participation in the start-up’s recent US$300-million funding round, according to a Bloomberg report on Monday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The big bets made by Alibaba, Tencent and other investors on Moonshot AI appear to reflect confidence on the leadership and vision of Yang, who honed his skills in developing large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI (GenAI) services – years before OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022.

Yang is considered “an entrepreneur with potential”, said Cao Xi, founding partner at Hong Kong investment company Monolith Management and a former partner at Sequoia Capital China. Monolith is among the group of venture capital firms backing Moonshot AI, which declined to provide details of the latest funding round.

Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin, 31, has been honing his skills in the development of artificial intelligence large language models. Photo: Weibo

In an interview with mainland media in February, Yang shared his vision for Moonshot AI, which was to develop into a business that “combines the technology idealism of OpenAI and business philosophy of ByteDance”.

While Moonshot AI did not make him available for an interview, Yang’s stellar academic track record and industry experience have been closely scrutinised by investors.