Tencent, IDG Capital, and HSG provided $400 million in funding across three rounds to Beijing-based Naive AI. The investment brought the startup's valuation to $1.4 billion as it prepares to release its first open-weight large language model this month. The company develops AI by modifying the structure of existing pretrained models and refining them through posttraining and reinforcement learning.

Tsinghua University Professor Jifeng Dai founded the secretive venture in February. Naive AI uses midtraining techniques to optimize model performance and is building a tool ecosystem ahead of its initial product launch. The company operates as a private research lab based in Beijing.