(Yicai) June 4 -- Jiyuan Lvdong Technology, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Wang Yunhe, a former director of Huawei's AI research center Noah's Ark Lab, has reached a valuation of USD100 million in an angel funding round, joining a growing list of ventures launched by Huawei alumni that are attracting investors.

The fundraising underscores investors’ growing appetite for ventures launched by former Huawei executives, reflecting confidence in the company’s engineering expertise and track record in developing advanced technologies. Industry insiders said capital’s enthusiasm for Huawei-linked entrepreneurs is effectively a premium on Huawei’s engineering capabilities.

Jiyuan Lvdong was registered on April 8, with Wang serving as chief executive officer and former Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab Chief Researcher Han Kai as chief technology officer, according to corporate data provider Tianyancha. The company focuses on AI agent technologies and has not disclosed details of the financing.

The deal comes amid a broader wave of departures from Huawei, with at least 10 specialists in AI, autonomous driving and chip technologies leaving the company over the past two to three years to launch startups focused on embodied AI, AI chips and AI agents.

According to public information, Wang, who was born in 1991, earned a doctorate in intelligent science from Peking University in 2018 and joined Huawei that year after interning at Noah’s Ark Lab in 2017. During nearly nine years at Huawei, he held positions in algorithm development and technology management. In March 2025, he became director of Noah’s Ark Lab and participated in the development of Huawei’s Pangu large language model. The GhostNet neural network architecture developed by his team was selected as one of Huawei’s top 10 inventions of the year.

In June 2025, Wang led the release of version 5.5 of the Pangu model, which adopted a mixture-of-experts architecture, an AI design intended to improve efficiency by activating only parts of the model for specific tasks. On March 20, 2026, Huawei announced it would open-source the Pangu model, with Wang attending the launch event as project leader. He confirmed his resignation on March 28.

Pangu Model Controversy

Before his departure, the Pangu model became the subject of debate over its originality. In July 2025, some developers alleged that Huawei’s open-sourced Pangu Pro MoE model shared significant similarities in certain parameter characteristics with Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen models, sparking industry discussion.

Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab later denied plagiarism allegations, saying some underlying components referenced open-source projects and that all development complied with open-source licensing requirements.

Wang said in an internal company response at the time that the Pangu model was not developed entirely from scratch, but all open-source components were obtained from public communities in compliance with relevant rules and did not infringe any intellectual property rights.

Huawei Alumni Join Startup Boom

Over the past two to three years, former Huawei executives and engineers have increasingly launched startups in emerging technology sectors, particularly embodied AI, AI chips and AI agents.

In embodied AI, former Huawei Vice President Deng Taihua and former Huawei “Genius Youth” recruit Peng Zhihui co-founded robot maker AgiBot in 2023. In 2025, Chen Yilun, former autonomous driving chief technology officer for Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solution Business Unit, co-founded TARS, focusing on in-vehicle and embodied AI technologies. TARS completed a USD455 million pre-A funding round in April 2026, setting a record for a single financing round in China's embodied AI sector.

Huawei alumni have also entered the AI chip sector. Ji Yu, a former Huawei Ascend compiler expert, founded Xingyun Integrated Circuits, which focuses on general-purpose graphics processing unit development. In April 2026, the company completed pre-A and pre-A+ funding rounds totaling more than CNY400 million (USD59.1 million), with 5Y Capital, Primavera Capital Group and SAIF Partners serving as lead investors.

Editor: Emmi Laine