Alibaba said to lead $300M round in AI data startup UniPat at $2.5B valuation
Foreign media reported in September that Alibaba plans to lead a $300M funding round in AI training and evaluation company UniPat at roughly a $2.5B valuation, with Tencent and Sequoia China reportedly also interested. UniPat was founded by Li Kuan, previously at Alibaba's Tongyi AI Lab working on post-training, data synthesis and reinforcement learning, while CTO Chen Liang worked on Qwen and Moonshot's multimodal teams. The piece also describes a wave of similar startups founded by ex-model-team staff, including Copula Lab (ex-MiniMax) and Zhineng Zhishi (ex-ByteDance Seed), building post-training data, agent environments and benchmarks.
If labs pay premiums for data and RL environments that directly lift specific capabilities, data suppliers could shift from labeling vendors to long-term R&D partners.
一家成立约一年的公司，被放到了25亿美元估值的谈判桌上。
9月，外媒报道称，阿里拟领投AI训练与评测公司UniPat的一轮3亿美元融资，本轮估值约25 亿美元，腾讯、红杉中国等投资者也传出参与意愿。
这个数字，曾经属于前两轮AI创业热潮中的明星项目：Kimi背后的月之暗面，在成立约一年时达到了约25亿美元的估值；AI编程工具Cursor背后的公司，则在成立约两年时进入这一估值量级。
一个造大模型，一个则是过去几年最热的能力方向。而这一次，是一家为模型提供训练数据和评测服务的公司。
此前，UniPat创始人李宽在阿里通义AI实验室从事过后训练分析、数据合成和强化学习工作。
这个组合有意思的地方在于：从模型团队出来的人，开始为模型团队生产训练材料，大厂则出现在投资者名单里。
#UniPat#Alibaba#Tencent#HongShan#Scale AI#MiniMax#Copula Lab#Zhineng Zhishi#ByteDance Seed#Moonshot AI#Mercor#Deeptune