New frontier labs

• Yang Zhilin: former Google Brain and Meta AI researcher (Jiemian)

• Jan 1, 2026, Series C (reported): US$500 million, valued at US$4.3 billion. Investors named: IDG Capital (lead, US$150 million), Alibaba, Tencent (South China Morning Post, citing LatePost, Jan 1, 2026)
• Jun 8, 2026, Round nearing close (reported): about $2 billion, valued at $20 billion post-money. Investors named: Meituan Long-Z Capital (lead) (Bloomberg (via Bloomberg Law), people familiar, Jun 8, 2026)
• Jul 30, 2026, Unnamed (reported): more than USD3.5 billion, valued at USD35 billion (Yicai Global, people familiar, Jul 30, 2026)

• Arena.ai ranked Kimi K3 first on its Code Arena WebDev leaderboard with a preliminary 1,679 Elo, as reported by DeepLearning.AI's The Batch. (DeepLearning.AI (The Batch), Jul 24, 2026)

Every 2026 valuation is from reports citing unnamed sources, not company confirmation. Still private as of the latest page fetched, but an IPO filing is reported. SCMP is owned by Alibaba, a Moonshot investor (SCMP discloses this). Jiemian page has no visible date (image path suggests 2026-05-07). Jiemian also reports ARR above $200 million in April 2026.

• Mira Murati: former OpenAI chief technology officer (TechCrunch, Jul 15, 2025)

• Jul 15, 2025, Seed: $2 billion, valued at $12 billion. Investors named: Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street (TechCrunch, Jul 15, 2025)
• Sep 3, 2026, New round in talks (reported, not closed): about $1 billion, valued at at least $40 billion. Investors named: Accel (reportedly in talks to lead) (TechCrunch, citing The Information, Sep 3, 2026)

The $40B figure comes from a report of talks, not a closed round; Accel and the company did not comment. The company reportedly sought $50B late in 2025. Inkling's licence is not named on the announcement page.

• Misha Laskin: former Google DeepMind researcher who led reward modeling for DeepMind's Gemini project (TechCrunch, Oct 9, 2025)
• Ioannis Antonoglou: former Google DeepMind researcher who co-created AlphaGo (TechCrunch, Oct 9, 2025)

• Oct 9, 2025, Unnamed: $2 billion, valued at $8 billion. Investors named: Nvidia, Disruptive, DST, 1789, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Eric Yuan, Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, CRV (TechCrunch, Oct 9, 2025)
• Apr 2026, New round (CEO said it was raising; close not confirmed): not stated, valued at $25 billion pre-money (Reuters (via The Star), citing the CEO's April remarks to CNBC, Oct 11, 2026)

Reflection originally focused on autonomous coding agents before repositioning as an open frontier lab (TechCrunch, 2025-10-09). Beam was announced on 2026-10-05/06 and weights released 2026-10-16; the release post gives no benchmark scores. Whether the $25B round closed was not confirmed in pages fetched.

• David Silver: former head of reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind and professor at University College London; led AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar (Quartz, Apr 27, 2026)

• Apr 27, 2026, Seed: $1.1 billion, valued at $5.1 billion. Investors named: Sequoia Capital (co-lead), Lightspeed (co-lead), Nvidia, Google, UK Sovereign AI, British Business Bank ($20 million) (Reuters, Apr 27, 2026)

Reuters calls it Europe's largest seed financing to date. Founded November 2025 per Quartz. Building a 'superlearner' that learns from its own experience rather than human data; could also be read as self-improving. No product found in pages fetched.

• Ilya Sutskever: OpenAI's former chief scientist; previously headed OpenAI's Superalignment team (TechCrunch, Sep 4, 2024)
• Daniel Gross: co-founder; named as SSI CEO in 2024 (no further background given) (TechCrunch, Sep 4, 2024)
• Daniel Levy: co-founder (no background given in source) (Associated Press, Jun 20, 2024)

• Sep 4, 2024, Unnamed: over $1 billion, valued at $5 billion (Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter). Investors named: NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, SV Angel (TechCrunch, Sep 4, 2024)
• Apr 12, 2025, Unnamed (reported): $2 billion, valued at $32 billion. Investors named: Greenoaks (reported lead) (TechCrunch, citing the Financial Times, Apr 12, 2025)
• Jul 27, 2026, Strategic equity investment: $5 billion (per a person briefed on the deal; companies did not disclose terms). Investors named: Nvidia (Reuters, Jul 28, 2026)

No product, model, API or paper found. Searched: ssi.inc (names no product), news searches for SSI releases in 2026. The $5B Nvidia figure is from one person briefed; the valuation at that deal was not reported in the pages fetched. Daniel Gross's current role was not checked.

• Andi Peng: former Anthropic researcher (RL and post-training of Claude 3.5 through 4.5) (TechCrunch, Jan 20, 2026)
• Georges Harik: Google's seventh employee (TechCrunch, Jan 20, 2026)
• Eric Zelikman: former xAI researcher (Grok) (TechCrunch, Jan 20, 2026)
• Yuchen He: former xAI researcher (Grok) (TechCrunch, Jan 20, 2026)
• Noah Goodman: Stanford professor of psychology and computer science (TechCrunch, Jan 20, 2026)

• Jan 20, 2026, Seed: $480 million, valued at $4.48 billion. Investors named: Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, Emerson Collective (TechCrunch, citing The New York Times, Jan 20, 2026)

Founding year is inferred from TechCrunch calling it 'three-month-old' in January 2026. Searched for a 2026 product launch; found only funding coverage. Research areas named: long-horizon and multi-agent RL, memory, user understanding.

• David Ha: former Google researcher; previously led research at Stability AI; also worked at Goldman Sachs (TechCrunch, Nov 17, 2025)
• Llion Jones: former Google researcher (TechCrunch, Nov 17, 2025)
• Ren Ito: co-founder (TechCrunch groups the three founders as former Google researchers) (TechCrunch, Nov 17, 2025)

• Series A: about ¥30 billion ($214 million), valued at $1.5 billion (TechCrunch, Nov 17, 2025)
• Nov 17, 2025, Series B: ¥20 billion (about $135 million), valued at $2.65 billion post-money. Investors named: MUFG, Khosla Ventures, Macquarie Capital, NEA, Lux Capital, In-Q-Tel (TechCrunch, Nov 17, 2025)

• The AI Scientist paper was peer-reviewed and published in Nature (Sakana's page links nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10265-5); per Sakana, a fully AI-generated paper earlier passed peer review at an ICLR 2025 workshop and was withdrawn after acceptance. (Sakana AI, Mar 26, 2026)

Sakana's self-improvement research (Darwin Gödel Machine, AI Scientist) also fits the self-improving category. Sakana lists the AI Scientist's limits itself, e.g. 'It occasionally produces naive or underdeveloped ideas.' No 2026 funding round found in pages fetched.

• Arthur Mensch: co-founder and CEO (no prior background stated on the page) (Mistral AI (About))
• Guillaume Lample: co-founder and Chief Science Officer (Mistral AI (About))
• Timothée Lacroix: co-founder and CTO (Mistral AI (About))

• Sep 2025, Series C: €1.7 billion (Orrick (Mistral's law firm), Sep 8, 2026)
• Sep 8, 2026, Series D: €3 billion, valued at more than €21 billion post-money. Investors named: Samsung Electronics (lead), Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT (co-lead), PSG Equity (co-lead), Advent, BlackRock-managed funds, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a16z, ASML, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures (Mistral AI, Sep 8, 2026)

Included as young (founded April 2023) and private. Orrick notes the WSJ's link refers to a '24-billion valuation', likely a dollar conversion; we use the company's euro figure.

• Jiang Daxin: CEO (background not stated in pages fetched) (KrASIA, Jan 26, 2026)

• Jan 26, 2026, Series B+: more than 5 billion yuan ($717 million). Investors named: Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment, China Life Insurance, Tencent (existing, increased stake) (Caixin Global, Jan 26, 2026)
• May 8, 2026, Pre-IPO round (reported): US$2.5 billion. Investors named: Huaqin Technology, OmniVision, ZTE, Hong Kong Investment Corporation (The Standard (Hong Kong), citing STAR Market Daily, May 8, 2026)

Whether StepFun has filed or listed since June 2026 could not be confirmed (search budget ran out). Valuations for the 2026 rounds were not stated in pages fetched. Rivals Zhipu and MiniMax listed in Hong Kong in January 2026 and are excluded as public.