Unique Research · Company / funding · April 28, 2023
On Apr 21, 2023, AI company Westlake Xinchen (西湖心辰) closed a strategic round led by Tom Cat (汤姆猫) with BlueRun Ventures (蓝驰创投) participating — second raise in ~a month after Mar 27 multi-ten-million USD Pre-A from Baidu Ventures, Dongkaitai, and Westlake University Education Foundation sustainability platform. This round: multimodal LM R&D + business expansion; Tom Cat becomes largest external shareholder outside the team. Prior round: team build + multimodal LM acceleration.
Founded 2021 by Lan Zhenzhong’s team with Westlake University AI research partners — AIGC for content + psychological counseling commercialization. Products: AI paint, AI writing, AI counseling. Lan: CMU AI PhD; ex-Google AI scientist; first author of language model ALBERT; MIT TR35 Asia-Pacific 2021; joined Westlake University 2020 as deep-learning lab lead / PhD advisor. Multimodal LMs = path to understanding/reasoning/self-learning AGI — analogous to humans learning via text/image/video.
Architecture: model layer → mid layer → app layer. RIO language LM series + dual-modal image-text models (dozens of members, ~10B–100B+ params; bilingual CN/EN; tool use: search, KG, external data). Mid layer: domain models (e.g. marketing) — API or custom; unstructured enterprise data newly valuable. Apps: counseling AI “Xiaotian”; writing “Friday” (>400k users, partial monetization; dialog bot with web + multimodal I/O); image “Dream Diary” (>1M users) — early data flywheel. RIO tested ≈ GPT-3.5 class; 2023 plans two iterations targeting GPT-4 parity on some tasks.
Lan’s CMU multimedia/CV background (IARPA multimedia event detection champ vs Stanford et al.); Google work with Transformer authors on Talking-Heads Attention / ALBERT on 1024 TPUs (Google News/Assistant). New raise open; seeks talent + strategic/resource-aligned investors for AGI for all.
4 CN images; attach on ingest. Author: Huajia; review Ski.
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