Efficiency-first edge intelligence
ModelBest Inc. (面壁智能) was founded in 2022 out of Tsinghua University's NLP lab, with professor Liu Zhiyuan as co-founder and chief scientist and Li Dahai as CEO. Closely tied to the OpenBMB open-source community, the company champions an 'Efficiency First' philosophy: the best model is the one with superior capability at lower cost — a Chinese counterpoint to the scale-at-all-costs race.
The MiniCPM family
ModelBest's open MiniCPM models pack outsized capability into edge-deployable sizes: MiniCPM text models (1.2B-4B), MiniCPM-V vision models whose 8B version achieved GPT-4V-level multimodal benchmarks, and MiniCPM-o omni-modal models handling text, image, video and audio. The models are among the most popular Chinese open-source releases on Hugging Face and GitHub, and power on-device AI in smartphones, AI PCs (via a China Telecom partnership) and automotive cockpits with partners like ThunderSoft.
Unicorn status
After angel and growth rounds from 2023 onward, ModelBest closed a Series E worth hundreds of millions of RMB in 2026 co-led by Shenzhen Capital Group and Huichuan Venture Capital at a reported ¥9.5B (~$1.3B) valuation, cementing its place as China's leading edge-model lab.