Tsinghua Associate Professor Dai Jifeng Founds Naive.ai, Secures Approximately $300 Million in Funding

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, the WeChat public account “Top Chinese Science and Technology Innovation Society” revealed that Dai Jifeng, an associate professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, has founded Naive.ai, which focuses on training agents using open-source models. The total funding amounts to approximately $300 million, with a valuation of around $800 million. Investors include top-tier funds and technology giants, although specific institutions have not been disclosed. Dai Jifeng is a well-known scholar in the field of computer vision, with representative works including deformable convolutional networks and the multimodal foundational model InternVL, with over 50,000 citations of his papers. He previously served as a chief researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and later as the executive research director at SenseTime, before returning to Tsinghua to teach in 2022. In 2025, he joined MiroMind, an AI company incubated by Shanda Network under Chen Tianqiao, as a co-founder. Several media outlets previously reported that MiroMind ceased operations in China in January of this year due to compliance reasons, after which Dai Jifeng left the company. Reports indicate that the core team of his new company includes former MiroMind members and co-founder Zhu Xizhou, who holds a joint PhD from the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia, and has previously served as a senior researcher at SenseTime and a young researcher at Shanghai AI Lab.