Baichuan Intelligence
Funding History
| Series A · 07/2024 | $2.7B |
|---|
About
Baichuan Intelligence is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of search engine Sogou, who left after Tencent's 2021 acquisition of that business to start a new large language model venture. Baichuan raised $50 million in an angel round at founding, followed by a $300 million Series A1 in October 2023 led by Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi that pushed its valuation past $1 billion within months of launch.
- CEO
- Wang Xiaochuan
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
- Founded
- April 2023
- Website
- https://www.baichuan-ai.com
Overview
Baichuan Intelligence is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of search engine Sogou, who left after Tencent's 2021 acquisition of that business to start a new large language model venture. Baichuan raised $50 million in an angel round at founding, followed by a $300 million Series A1 in October 2023 led by Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi that pushed its valuation past $1 billion within months of launch.
The company built a family of open-source Chinese-language foundation models (including Baichuan-13B and Baichuan2-53B) and closed a $693 million Series A in July 2024 at a roughly $2.7 billion valuation, again backed by Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi alongside state-linked AI investment funds from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Facing intensifying competition among China's general-purpose large language model developers, Wang announced in March 2025 that Baichuan would drop its recently launched finance vertical and other side projects to concentrate on medical AI, saying he had wanted to build for healthcare "from day one." That pivot produced the Baichuan-M medical model series, released in partnership with institutions including Beijing Children's Hospital, with the Baichuan-M4 model and an AI family-doctor product unveiled in May 2026.
The strategic narrowing coincided with the departure of Baichuan's entire founding leadership team apart from Wang Xiaochuan himself: co-founder and CMO Hong Tao left in December 2024, model-research lead Chen Weipeng and internet-business lead Jiao Ke departed in early 2025, technical co-founder Xie Jian departed in July 2025, and co-founder and president Ru Liyun exited in July 2026 to become president of a separately listed company. Wang has said the company plans to pursue an IPO as early as 2027.
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