JAKARTA - Huawei's technical reputation is still a magnet for technology investors. Jiyuan Lvdong Technology, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by a former Huawei research executive, has managed to reach a valuation of USD100 million, or around Rp1.78 trillion at an assumed exchange rate of USD1 of around Rp17,800, in an early stage funding round.
Reported by Yicai Global, quoted Saturday, June 13, the company was founded by Wang Yunhe, former director of Huawei's AI research center, Noah's Ark Lab. The startup is developing AI agent technology, an AI system that can perform various tasks more independently based on user instructions.
Jiyuan Lvdong was officially registered on April 8. Wang served as CEO, while the position of chief technology officer (CTO) was held by Han Kai, former chief researcher of Noah's Ark Lab, according to company information provider Tianyancha. The company has not disclosed details of the funding obtained.
Investor interest in Jiyuan Lvdong shows the market's great confidence in talent born from the Huawei ecosystem. A number of industry players assess investor enthusiasm for founders with a Huawei background as a reflection of confidence in the company's engineering capabilities and technology track record.
This phenomenon emerged amid the wave of Huawei technology talent. In the last two to three years, at least 10 experts in the fields of AI, autonomous vehicles, and chips have left the company to build startups in the fields of AI agents, AI chips, and embodied AI.
Embodied AI is artificial intelligence technology applied to physical devices, such as robots or vehicles, so that they can understand and interact with the real environment.
Wang, who was born in 1991, earned a doctorate in intelligence science from Peking University in 2018. He joined Huawei the same year after previously being an intern at Noah's Ark Lab in 2017.
During his nearly nine years at Huawei, Wang held a number of positions in the fields of algorithm development and technology management. In March 2025, he became the director of Noah's Ark Lab and was involved in the development of Huawei's Pangu large language model (LLM).
Wang's team also developed the GhostNet neural network architecture, which was selected as one of Huawei's 10 best inventions of the year.
In June 2025, Wang led the launch of Pangu version 5.5 which uses a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. This technology improves AI efficiency by only activating certain parts of the model according to the type of task being worked on.
On March 20, 2026, Huawei announced that Pangu would become an open source project. Wang was present at the event as the project leader, before finally confirming his resignation on March 28.
According to a Yicai Global report, before Wang left Huawei, Pangu was a topic of debate in the industry. In July 2021, a number of developers assessed that the open source Pangu Pro MoE model had similarities in certain parameter characteristics with Alibaba Group's Qwen model.
Noah's Ark Lab denied the plagiarism allegations. Huawei explained that some basic components use references from open source projects and all of its development has followed the applicable licensing rules.
In the company's internal response at the time, Wang said Pangu was not built entirely from scratch. However, all open source components were obtained from the public community in accordance with the rules and did not violate intellectual property rights.
The wave of startups from Huawei alumni is not only happening in the AI agent sector. In the field of embodied AI, former Huawei Vice President Deng Taihua along with former member of Huawei's "Genius Youth" program Peng Zhihui founded the AgiBot robot company in 2023.
In 2025, Huawei's former CTO of autonomous vehicles, Chen Yilun, co-founded TARS, a company developing AI for vehicles and embodied AI technology.
According to Yicai Global, TARS managed to obtain pre-Series A funding of USD455 million in April 2026. This value is a record for one round of funding in the embodied AI sector in China.
Huawei alumni also entered the AI chip business. Former Huawei Ascend compiler expert Ji Yu founded Xingyun Integrated Circuits, which developed a versatile graphics processing unit (GPU). In April 2026, the company raised pre-Series A and pre-Series A+ funding worth more than 400 million yuan or around USD59.1 million.
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