By Kate Yuan

(JW Insights) Oct 17 -- Chinese AI startup Baichuan AI (百川智能) recently completed series A1 strategic financing of $300 million from China’s tech giants and investment institutions including Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi, according to the company.

The company has now raised a total of $350 million funds counting in the $50 million raised in its angel round.

Beijing-based Baichuan AI was founded on April 10 this year by Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of China’s major search engine and input software Sogou. Its core team members come from leading tech companies including Sogou, Google, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Microsoft, and ByteDance. The team currently consists of more than 170 employees, with nearly 70% of them holding a master's degree or above, and over 80% of the workforce being research and development personnel.

Since its establishment, the company has successively released four open-source large models, Baichuan-7B/13B and Baichuan2-7B/13B, which can be used for free in commercial applications, as well as two closed-source large models, Baichuan-53B and Baichuan2-53B. On average, it released a new large model every 28 days.

On August 31, Baichuan AI obtained registration under the "Interim Measures for the Administration of AIGC Services" issued by the Chinese government. It is the only large model startup company established this year among the first batch of eight companies. On September 25, it opened the Baichuan2-53B API interface, officially entering the B2B field.