Tsinghua Professor Dai Jifeng Launches Naive.ai, Raises ~$300M at $800M Valuation

Gate News message, April 22 — Dai Jifeng, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s Department of Electronic Engineering, has founded Naive.ai, a company focused on open-source model post-training and AI agents. The startup has raised approximately $300 million at an estimated valuation of $800 million, with backing from leading venture capital firms and major tech companies; specific investors were not disclosed.

Dai is a renowned computer vision researcher whose work includes deformable convolutional networks and InternVL, a multimodal foundation model. His papers have accumulated over 50,000 citations. He previously served as a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and as executive research director at SenseTime, before returning to Tsinghua in 2022. In 2025, Dai joined MiroMind, an AI company incubated by Shanda Network (backed by Chen Tianqiao), as a co-founder. MiroMind ceased operations in mainland China in January 2026 due to compliance reasons, after which Dai departed.

Naive.ai’s core team includes former MiroMind members and co-founder Zhu Xizhou, a joint Ph.D. graduate from University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia. Zhu previously worked as a senior researcher at SenseTime and as a young researcher at Shanghai AI Lab.