Having the six little dragons is not enough, Hangzhou has invested in Beijing’s little tigers

Wen| Rongzhong Finance

Suddenly, it was like a spring breeze that came overnight, and Hangzhou repeatedly left the circle after the Spring Festival.

Behind this phenomenon is inseparable from the six high-profile companies DeepSeek, Yushu Technology, Yunshen Technology, Game Science, Strong Brain Technology and Group Nuclear Technology. The reason why they can stand out and become the focus of public attention is mainly due to their outstanding technological breakthroughs in the cutting-edge field of science and technology. These companies have not only caused waves in the industry, but have also become hot topics in society. Their rise is not only a microcosm of the strong development of cutting-edge technology companies, but also a vivid reflection of the remarkable results of Zhejiang Province’s economic structural transformation.

It is worth mentioning that Hangzhou’s ambitions go far beyond this. Recently, Hangzhou State-owned Assets invested 1 billion yuan to invest in Beijing’s well-known AI unicorn intelligence and began to bet on the second DeepSeek.

It is reported that Zhipu, a unicorn enterprise in the field of large models, has just completed a new round of strategic financing of more than 1 billion yuan. Investors include Hangzhou Urban Investment Industry Fund, Shangcheng Capital, etc., aiming to promote the domestic base GLM of Intelligent Spectrum. Technological innovation and ecological development of the model. Since Smart Vision announced the completion of 3 billion yuan in financing on December 17 last year, it has been less than three months since this new financing. This is also the first time that the big model six tigers have raised funds this year.

According to enterprise check data, this is the 11th financing completed by Zhipu. Previously, Zhipu’s investors included Tsinghua Holdings, Zhongke Liangchuang, Dachen Caizhi, China Holdings Fund, Menmen Ventures, Nanjing Turing, Beijing Dafan, Junlian Capital, Qiming Ventures, Meituan Zhantou, Tencent Zhantou, Alibaba Zhantou, Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund, Hillhouse Capital, Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Prosperity, Zhongguancun Science City, etc. From VC to Internet giants, to today’s state-owned assets background, the strength of Zhishu has been further verified.

Zhipu said that the new round of financing will be mainly used to promote technological innovation and ecological development of its domestic base GLM model. At present, Zhipu has established Zhejiang Zhipu Xinpian Technology Co., Ltd. in Hangzhou, which is committed to serving economic entities in Zhejiang Province and the Yangtze River Delta region and further promoting the digital transformation and upgrading of the regional economy.

Artificial intelligence unicorn hatched by Tsinghua Laboratory

Intelligent AI was born out of the KEG Laboratory of Tsinghua University. Since 2017, the laboratory has begun to make AI pre-training models, which has laid a solid foundation for intelligent AI in algorithm research. KEG Laboratory has one characteristic that is different from others. It has a group of engineers and researchers working together for a long time. This allows members of the laboratory team to solve not only technical scientific research problems in AI algorithms, but also technical application problems in engineering.

By 2019, under the leadership of CEO Zhang Peng and others, this team left the laboratory of Tsinghua University and Intelligent Spectrum AI was officially established. Although it has just been established, the Intelligence AI team has accumulated a deep foundation in this field and its research content is at the forefront.

In May 2020, Open AI released the latest GPT-3, which directly pushed the parameter scale of the pre-trained model to more than 100 billion. The intelligence displayed by the model was beyond imagination. According to Intelligent AI, this was one of the critical time points for the team to invest in large-scale model research. The shocking release of GPT-3 allowed Smart Spectrum AI to start studying the impact of parameter quantities as soon as possible. When we have a deeper understanding of GPT3, the idea of investing more resources and energy to make the model bigger becomes more firm in the minds of the Intelligent AI team.

After in-depth research on Western AI technology, the team combined the capabilities of one-way backward prediction model frameworks such as GPT with two-way prediction model frameworks such as Google’s BERT. In this way, the domestically produced large model path GLM was officially born. At that moment, perhaps Intelligent AI has changed from the original benchmark of Open AI to beyond Open AI.

Immediately afterwards, the research on Intelligent AI made great progress. In 2021, the 10 billion parameter model GLM-10B was trained. In the same year, the MoE architecture was used to successfully train a convergent trillion-dollar sparse model. In 2022, the Chinese and English bilingual 100 billion level ultra-large-scale pre-training model GLM-130B was jointly developed.

It is reported that the GLM-130B is the only global mainstream model in Asia selected for Stanford evaluation in 2022. This excellent big language model has also directly made Intelligent Spectrum AI famous and attracted the attention of many capital institutions and leading companies. Not only in China, GLM-130B has also become a big language model in China recognized by all leading technology companies in Silicon Valley.

The high-profile technical strength has also made Zhipu go extremely smoothly on the road to capital. In and before the B round, Smart Spectrum received investment from well-known VC institutions such as Zhongke Chuangxing, Dachen Caizhi, Junlian Capital, Qiming Venture Capital, and China Capital; since the B-2 round, in addition to other new institutional investments such as Hillhouse, Smart Spectrum has also successively won bets from CVC companies such as Meituan, Tencent, and Alibaba; Later, there were a number of state-owned assets such as the Beijing City Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, the Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund, the Zhongguancun Science City and now the Hangzhou City Investment Industry Fund. The overall trend is from VC to major Internet companies and then to state-owned assets. It is worth mentioning that Prosperity, a fund managed by the venture capital department of Middle Eastern oil giant Saudi Aramco, has also invested US$600 million in Smart Vision.

This kind of financing history can be said to be unique among today’s big model unicorns.

In addition to scientific research strength, Intelligent Spectrum AI has also achieved great achievements in commercial development. At present, the questioning of this track by investment institutions in the industry has shifted from data capabilities to implementation capabilities. For Intelligent AI, it has always adopted a strategy of mainly toB and supplemented by toC. They believe that the strategy is extremely consistent with the team’s own genes and past experience.

At the level of B-side customers, Intelligent Spectrum AI implements the MaaS service model and launches a large model MaaS open platform. That is, it can provide multiple large model solutions such as exclusive privatization deployment and API calls based on customer needs. Zhipu said: Its MaaS platform has supported more than 700,000 enterprises and application developers; in terms of privatization deployment, it serves more than 20 industries such as finance, medical care, education, and government affairs, and has achieved large-scale applications in more than 10,000 enterprises and institutions.

In the second half of 2024, Intelligent Spectrum has successively launched the base model GLM-4-Plus, the Agent model AutoGLM, and the inference model GLM-Zero, which benchmark the performance of OpenAI’s corresponding models. Not long ago, Zhipu also announced open source plans. Zhipu said that 2025 will be the year of intelligent spectrum open source, and new large models (including base models, inference models, multimodal models, Agents, etc.) will be released soon and made open source.

Following the long reasoning model, Zhipu is betting on the next technology flashpoint, agent. According to Zhipu, 2025 is the year of agent, and OpenAI launched agent Operator and Deep Research in January this year. In this regard, Smart Spectrum proposed the concept of Phone Use, launched AutoGLM and GLM-PC that can simulate users ‘autonomous operations across applications such as computers and mobile phones, and cooperated with Samsung mobile phones based on Agentic GLM.

It is worth mentioning that Zhipu completed its first model in 2025 on March 4: CogView4, the first open source cultural graph model that supports the generation of Chinese characters. It ranks first in the comprehensive score in the DPG-Bench benchmark., achieving SOTA in the open source cultural graph model. This model is also the first image generation model to follow the Apache 2.0 protocol.

According to Zhipu, CogView4 has strong complex semantic alignment and command following capabilities, supports Chinese and English bilingual input of any length, can generate images of any resolution within a given range, and has strong text generation capabilities. CogView4 ranks first in the DPG-Bench benchmark in terms of comprehensive scores and reaches SOTA in the open source cultural graph model.

Hangzhou, which frequently leaves the circle

After the Spring Festival, Hangzhou quickly exited the circle with the help of the six dragons. Why Hangzhou is the whole network?& rdquo; How to reproduce Hangzhou?& rdquo; Similar issues.

Interestingly, most of the founders of the six dragons were not from Hangzhou, but they all chose to start a business in Hangzhou.

Hangzhou is a peaceful and gentle hometown, a beautiful landscape resort, and an incubator of dreams. Internet pioneers such as Jack Ma and Ding Lei created Alibaba and Netease here; there are also security giants Hikvision and Dahua, and automobile giants Geely and Zero Run. Now, with the six little dragons, Hangzhou has completed the iteration of urban genes under the leadership of generations of entrepreneurs. Not all the founders of these companies are locals in Hangzhou, but they all choose to pursue their dreams here. As writer Li Hangyu said: Hangzhou is the Hangzhou of the world.& rdquo;

“A good bird chooses a tree to live, and a wise minister chooses a master to serve. For the above-mentioned outstanding companies, it may be Hangzhou’s excellent business environment that attracts them.

As one of the important highlands for scientific and technological innovation in China, Hangzhou has launched a series of special policies with strong pertinence and wide coverage in recent years, providing scientific and technological innovation enterprises with multi-dimensional support such as tax exemptions, R & D subsidies and green channels. These policies not only effectively reduce the operating costs of enterprises, but also free up more resources and energy for enterprises to focus on technology research and development and product innovation. At the critical stage of development, many technology companies have benefited from the strong support of these policies that they have been able to devote themselves to technological difficulties, ultimately achieve major breakthroughs, and cultivate more and more innovative results with wide dissemination value.

For example, in 2023, in order to implement the No. 1 Reform Project to Optimize and Improve the Business Environment, Hangzhou City issued the “Implementation Opinions of the Hangzhou City People’s Government on Making Every Efforts to Build a City with the Best Business Environment and Empowering High-Quality Economic Development.” The document clearly states that Hangzhou should be built into a benchmark city for the business environment with the highest efficiency, the best service level, the strongest factor guarantee, the strongest legal atmosphere, and the best social satisfaction in the country. Specific measures include: 1) Reduce the comprehensive financing costs of enterprises, guide financial institutions to establish a continuous loan + flexible loan mechanism, continue to carry out special actions for first loan accounts, and strengthen credit support for small, medium and micro enterprises;2) Improve the government financing guarantee system to ensure The average guarantee rate of government financing guarantee institutions supporting agriculture and small enterprises is not higher than 0.8%;3) Create a 3+N Hangzhou Industrial Fund Cluster, innovate the industrial fund operation and management mechanism, and improve the investment due diligence exemption mechanism.

In addition, the government is also actively opening up urban data and scenario resources such as medical care and transportation to build a test ground for commercial verification for enterprises. For example, the successful application of Yushu Technology and Yunshen Technology’s robots in these scenarios not only optimizes product performance, but also intuitively demonstrates to the public how technological innovation can actually change lives through in-depth media reports.

As the Xinhua Agency commented: The success of the six little dragons is no accident. It stems from their firm persistence in innovation, their tenacity of sitting on the bench for ten years, and their continuously optimized business environment. With fertile soil to nourish innovation and reform to stimulate vitality, Hangzhou has great potential in developing new productive forces. The mysterious Eastern power will bring more surprises to the world.

At the same time, the support of Hangzhou’s local capital cannot be ignored. Hangzhou’s active venture capital ecosystem has injected a steady stream of financial support into the growth of the six little dragons. As we all know, technology start-ups need a lot of financial support in their early development stages, and behind the six dragons is the energetic state-owned capital at play a role.

Taking Hangzhou city-level funds as an example, the Hangzhou Science and Technology Innovation Fund and Hangzhou Innovation Fund managed by Hangzhou City State-owned Capital Investment and Operation Co., Ltd. cover four companies among the six small dragons, including Yunshen Technology, Yushu Technology, Qiangnao Technology and In-depth Search. These two funds were born in June 2023 and are an important part of Hangzhou ‘s 3+N industrial fund cluster with a total scale of more than 300 billion yuan. Among them, Hangzhou Science and Technology Innovation Fund, as a policy-oriented government guidance fund, focuses on early investment, small investment, and scientific investment, while Hangzhou Innovation Fund is a market-oriented state-owned industry fund, focusing on strategic emerging industries and investing in strong investment and large investment industries.

As of February 2025, the total approval scale of these two major 100 billion funds has exceeded 185 billion yuan, leveraging social capital of approximately 135 billion yuan, and the cumulative investment amount has reached 72.5 billion yuan. It has supported 120 listed companies (including mergers and acquisitions and listings) through fund investment and science and technology innovation finance.

In addition, Hangzhou, as the fifth city of domestic capital, has active private capital. Local investment institutions such as Huarui Investment and Puhua Capital are also promoting the prosperity of Hangzhou’s venture capital ecosystem. According to data from the Securities Investment Fund Association of China, as of February 16, 2025, there were 616 private fund managers with both registered and offices in Hangzhou, and the total number of funds managed was 5042.

In Hangzhou, the mutual promotion and synergy between industrial guidance funds and private capital has formed a relatively complete venture capital ecosystem. At present, a new round of scientific and technological revolution represented by artificial intelligence is sweeping the world, profoundly changing production models and greatly improving production efficiency. Through a series of precise layout and professional services, Hangzhou has injected a steady stream of power into the vigorous development of this mysterious Eastern power.

The pattern of six tigers in the big model changes

With the rapid rise of DeepSeek, the pattern of six tigers in the domestic AI market has undergone significant changes, and the commercialization process and open source strategies of these companies have recently become the focus.

In 2025, accelerating commercialization has become the common goal of many AI companies. Looking back on 2024, major model manufacturers are mainly busy with price wars and traffic marketing wars. However, with the open source of high-performance models such as DeepSeek V3 and R1, many manufacturers have begun to re-evaluate the profitability of closed-source models.

DeepSeek’s extensive attention has contributed to the strategic adjustment of the six tigers to a certain extent.

Kimi, which is mainly C-terminal, has always adopted a re-launch strategy. Recently, it was reported that the company is rethinking this strategy internally and decided to reduce investment and focus instead on the training of basic models.

Inside the Dark Side of the Moon, it emphasizes the need to adhere to the SOTA (Current Best) of the basic model, and plans to re-train the basic model while seizing opportunities at the application level. One of the directions selected within the company is to develop DeepResearch, an agent product for in-depth research.

Everything may look for new growth points on the B-end. In response to an interview at the beginning of the year that some teams were merged into Ali, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Zero One and Chairman of Innovation Works, said that when the Yi-Large model was released in May last year, the team had realized the model’s shortcomings in speed and cost performance, and decided to abandon the original planned Yi-X-Large model. Kai-Fu Lee believes that the opportunity for everything in 2025 lies in tapping the PMF of the To B model.

MiniMax released a new generation of 01 series models on January 15 and is open source. Compared with Kimi k1.5 ‘s 128,000 tokens, the 01 series model supports up to 4 million tokens of contextual input. Baichuan Intelligent focuses on the application of large models in the medical field. It recently signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing Children’s Hospital of the National Children’s Medical Center, and plans to jointly launch five AI medical products.

Zhipu raised 3 billion yuan in funding in December last year and won an order worth tens of millions of US dollars from countries in the Belt and Road Initiative. With the signing of big orders such as Samsung, Smart Music’s revenue in less than a month after the holiday has exceeded 100 million, achieving the dual goal of attracting gold and seeking gold.

2025 is not only the year of business exams, but also regarded as the year of open source of models.

Zhipu said: 2025 will be the year of open source for Zhipu. We will release a new big model and open source. DeepSeek Open Source Week has just ended, and we look forward to more domestic technologies taking over and injecting more power into the domestic big model ecosystem. rdquo; The CogView4 mentioned above is a large model released by Intelligent Spectrum in 2025.

In fact, with the open source of DeepSeek R1, manufacturers such as Baichuan Intelligence, Step Star, and Baidu have also joined the ranks of open source. This means that the open source battle between model makers will become more intense, as they will compete with DeepSeek for technology customers and developers to cultivate their own innovation ecosystem.

Following the long reasoning model, Zhipu is betting on Agent, the next technology explosion point. 2025 is undoubtedly the year for Agents. OpenAI launched Agent Operator and Deep Research in January this year. Smart Spectrum took the lead in proposing the concept of Phone Use, launched AutoGLM and GLM-PC that can simulate users ‘autonomous cross-application operations, and cooperated with Samsung mobile phones, leading the way among domestic and foreign models. In addition, Step Star has also cooperated with Lucky, OPPO and others to develop Agents.

There is no doubt that with the popularity brought by open source, competition among model manufacturers will become more intense this year.