ModelBest
Funding History
| Growth Round · 07/2026 | $2.8B |
|---|
About
ModelBest builds small, efficient large language models designed to run directly on phones, cars, robots and other edge devices rather than in the cloud, competing on efficiency-per-parameter against far larger frontier models from labs like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Zhipu AI.
- CEO
- Li Dahai
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
- Founded
- August 2022
- Website
- https://www.modelbest.cn
Overview
ModelBest (面壁智能, Mianbi Zhineng) is a Beijing-based edge-AI large language model developer founded in August 2022 as a commercial spinoff of Tsinghua University's Natural Language Processing Laboratory. Co-founded by CEO Li Dahai, a former Zhihu partner and CTO, and Chief Scientist Liu Zhiyuan, a Tsinghua computer science professor, the company builds the MiniCPM family of small, efficient on-device models — alongside the multimodal MiniCPM-V/O series, the VoxCPM speech models, and edge hardware such as the Pinea Pi development board and EdgeClaw Box AI-agent appliance — that it positions as GPT-4-class performance at a fraction of the parameter count.
By September 2026 the MiniCPM series had logged more than 38 million cumulative downloads on GitHub and Hugging Face, and its models power on-device AI features in Samsung's Galaxy AI (following Chinese regulatory filing approval) and in production vehicles from Changan, Changan Mazda, SAIC and Geely.
ModelBest raised across at least six disclosed financing rounds between April 2023 and July 2026, backed by investors including Zhihu, Zhipu AI, Springhill Fund, Huawei Habo, Loongson Capital, China Telecom, Citic Goldstone, Shenzhen Capital Group, Inovance Capital, and Kweichow Moutai's investment arm. Its valuation crossed the $1 billion unicorn threshold in early 2026 and reportedly surpassed RMB20 billion (about $2.8 billion) by mid-2026, after which the company filed for A-share IPO counseling with the Shanghai Securities Regulatory Bureau in August 2026.
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