Tian Keyu, a former ByteDance intern, has raised nearly $30 million from investors including 5Y Capital and IDG Capital, according to Phoenix Technology, citing Bloomberg. The round gives his startup a post-money valuation of $200 million.
The capital will go to a company that remains in stealth mode. The report said the startup is working on world models, an area where Tian is seeking to compete with AI researchers including Fei-Fei Li.
ByteDance dispute resurfaced as fundraising drew attention
In 2024, while interning at ByteDance, Tian was accused of disrupting model training and causing resource losses by writing and altering code after becoming dissatisfied with how team resources were allocated. ByteDance sued for RMB 8 million in damages and said the intern had been dismissed. The company also said online claims that the case involved more than 8,000 cards and losses of over tens of millions of dollars were seriously exaggerated.
A court ruled that Tian had violated his contract, ordering him to pay RMB 500,000 in damages and forfeiting all of his wages.
Tian said he had shut down another intern’s program to free up computing power. He acknowledged the conduct was improper, described it as 「替天行道」, and said he would have handled it more wisely if given another chance.
Stealth team has no public product yet
Tian completed his master’s degree at Peking University last summer and was the first author of one of the best papers at NeurIPS 2024, the report said.
His lab has not disclosed a name or product. The team has about 10 people, including other former ByteDance employees. Tian said he has built a dictionary containing about 200,000 symbols that humans cannot recognize for use in video processing, and plans to feed 100 million hours of video into the model.
He said the technology could cut the cost of generating one second of video by at least one order of magnitude. The team plans to present the work through offline events before a full model release in 2027.
Investors confirmed the deal
As of publication, a ByteDance spokesperson had not responded on the dismissal issue. Representatives of 5Y Capital and IDG Capital confirmed the investment but did not comment further.