Ex-ByteDance intern Keyu Tian's stealth world-model lab raises ~$30M at $200M valuation
Bloomberg reports that Keyu Tian, a former ByteDance intern and Peking University PhD student, has raised roughly $30 million for his still-unnamed world-model startup, with 5Y Capital and IDG among the investors, at a $200 million post-money valuation. The roughly 10-person team is building a visual symbol system of about 200,000 symbols, plans to train on around 100 million hours of video, and claims it can cut video-generation cost by at least an order of magnitude, with a full model targeted around 2027. Tian was first author of the NeurIPS 2024 best paper on Visual Autoregressive Modeling (VAR) and was dismissed and sued by ByteDance over a 2024 code-tampering incident during his internship.
If a compact visual symbol language can compress world modeling, training and inference costs could fall sharply — but the lab has no product or model yet, and the founder's disputed history adds reputational risk.