As the lead author of an award-winning paper at NeurIPS 2024, the researcher has secured backing from 5Y Capital and IDG Capital for a laboratory – which has neither a name nor a product – that is aiming to enter the World Labs arena.
According to Bloomberg, Tian Keyu has raised nearly $30 million from 5Y Capital and IDG Capital for a research lab dedicated to world models, systems that are supposed to represent and predict the evolution of physical environments. The valuation reached $200 million after the operation, even though the structure has no public name, demonstration, or published model. The team consists of about ten people, including other former ByteDance employees.
The bet is based above all on the founder's background. During his internship at ByteDance, while he was working on a master's degree at Peking University (obtained in the summer of 2025), Tian was the first author of the article on Visual Autoregressive Modeling, which generates images from coarse to detailed by predicting successive resolutions; he received a best paper award at NeurIPS 2024. Moving from the still image to a coherent environment that reacts to movement and action, however, remains a completely different challenge, with robotics, interactive video and autonomous driving in his sights.
Bloomberg presents the project as a competitor to World Labs, the company of Fei-Fei Li, which launched its Marble model and signed a deal to join AMD at the end of September.
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