WWIRESCREEN · SPECIAL REPORT · CHINA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WS-2026-034 · AUGUST 2026
Built and
Owned
The people, the money and the ownership behind China’s leading AI companies.
China’s AI boom is founder-controlled, Big Tech-financed and, in places, state-funded — often at the same time.
55
People leading China’s AI industry
5
Frontier-model companies setting the pace
81.6%
Of DeepSeek’s Chinese company held by its founder
5 of 5
Companies Tencent has invested in, directly or through vehicles
18.1%
Of Moonshot’s Chinese company traced to government bodies
Ownership percentages describe the Chinese operating company, which is what Chinese filings cover · Shareholdings traced on the WireScreen platform, August 6, 2026 · Valuations are market or last-round figures, unaudited · Biographical source: The Wire China, Who’s Who: China’s AI Industry, February 2025, to which WireScreen adds three investors · Prepared by WireScreen Research
What we found
A start-up boom with unusually
concentrated power
Over the past eighteen months, a handful of Chinese AI companies went from obscurity to some of the largest valuations in the industry. WireScreen followed their share registers through Chinese corporate filings. Four findings from WireScreen data hold across the five companies leading the boom.
1
At three of the five, founder control remains extraordinarily concentrated.
Liang Wenfeng holds 81.6% of DeepSeek’s Hangzhou company — a look-through economic interest, with the June round structured to leave the votes with him. Yang Zhilin holds 51.8% of Moonshot’s Beijing company. And at listed MiniMax, Yan Junjie’s vehicles hold under a quarter of the shares yet control the company through weighted voting rights — the exchange’s own designation.
DeepSeek 81.6% · Moonshot 51.8% · MiniMax: control by weighted votes
2
China’s Big Tech companies are financing their own challengers.
Tencent has invested in every one of the five AI tigers, directly or through investment vehicles; Alibaba is in three. Both ship frontier models of their own, so they are financing the companies they are racing against. Alibaba is the largest outside shareholder of MiniMax, at 12.6% of the listed group.
Tencent 5 of 5 · Alibaba 3 of 5 · MiniMax’s largest outside holder: Alibaba, 12.6%
3
State capital can sit several layers down.
WireScreen traced eighteen government bodies to 18.1% of Moonshot’s Beijing company — from the national pension fund at 7.4% to a district asset office at 0.1%. None appear on the direct share register; every one is reached by following a fund or a partnership back to its investors.
18 government bodies · 18.1% together · 0 on the direct register
4
“Private or state-owned?” is the wrong question.
Founder capital, tech platform capital and state capital overlap in different proportions in each of the five. WireScreen can break down the blend of state and private capital in each start-up.
Three kinds of capital · five different mixes
Source: Chinese corporate registrations and exchange filings traced on the WireScreen platform, August 6, 2026. Look-through percentages are computed from filed holdings rather than printed on any single document; Zhipu’s control figure is printed in its listing prospectus.
Part one · The people
China’s AI elite comes from a
surprisingly small world
The Wire China’s February 2025 Who’s Who named fifty-two people leading China’s artificial intelligence push. In this report, WireScreen added three investors whose firms sit on the share registers of four of the five companies. Read alphabetically, the list is a directory. Re-sorted, it shows how the industry is organised — and how small, credentialed and interconnected the world at the top of it is.
4 in 5
Of the original fifty-two hold doctorates
16
Of the original fifty-two have worked at Microsoft
5
Of the original fifty-two work at Tsinghua alone
2
Of the original fifty-two are women
Grouped by function, the fifty-five fall into eight rooms: the founders shipping frontier models, the chief scientists of the platforms, the chip and robotics companies, the surveillance firms, the investors, the professors, the state laboratories and the officials who write the rules. The rooms are small and the walls between them are thin: the same institutions — one university, one former employer, a handful of funds — recur from room to room. The full fifty-five, with biographies and sourcing, are in the appendix.
Source: The Wire China, Who’s Who: China’s AI Industry, February 2025. Groupings are WireScreen’s. The three investors added by WireScreen appear in The Money and are excluded from every statistic quoted from the original list.
Part one · One employer
Before China’s AI boom, there was
Microsoft Research Asia
Sixteen of the original fifty-two have worked at Microsoft — a share no other employer on the list comes close to — and most passed through one building in Beijing. The companies did not appear from nowhere. They emerged from a talent pipeline built over decades.
Microsoft
Research Asia
微软亚洲研究院 · BEIJING · OPENED 1998
Microsoft’s basic-research laboratory in Beijing trained a generation of Chinese computer scientists — and then watched them leave to run the companies, faculties and laboratories that now define the field.
16 of 52
Worked at Microsoft at some point. Fifteen are named in their own entries, landing in seven of the eight rooms — every one except the policymakers
To the start-ups
Jiang Daxin→Chief executive, StepFun
Kai-Fu Lee→Chief executive, 01.AI
Xu Li→Chief executive, SenseTime
Yin Qi→Chief executive, Megvii
Yu Kai→Founder and chief executive, Horizon Robotics
To the platforms
Wang Jingdong→Chief scientist, computer vision, Baidu
Zhou Jingren→Chief technology officer, Alibaba Cloud
Yu Dong→Distinguished scientist, Tencent AI Lab
Tian Qi→Chief AI scientist, Huawei
To the academy, the state labs and the money
Harry Shum→Council chairman, HKUST
Zhang Yaqin→Chair professor, Tsinghua University
Wang Zhongyuan→President, Beijing Academy of AI
Lu Qi→Founder, MiraclePlus
Zhang Hongjiang→Venture partner, Source Code Capital
The second pole: Tsinghua University 清华大学
Zhipu was founded out of Tsinghua’s computer-science department — Tang Jie and Zhang Bo, its chief scientist and the oldest person on this list, are both here — and the university still holds 3.5% of the listed company. Andrew Yao runs its College of AI; five of the original fifty-two work at Tsinghua alone, and its professors sit on the government’s AI advisory bodies.
Source: The Wire China’s Who’s Who entries, February 2025; Zhipu shareholding from its listing prospectus. Zhang Bo was a consultant to MSRA, not an employee.
Part two · The companies
Five companies broke from the pack
Since 2023 five independent frontier-model developers have pulled clear of the rest — the five this report examines as the AI tigers. WireScreen has traced each company’s share register as it changed hands, several times over, in three years. All five were privately held until January 2026; as of August 2026, three remain private.
Why not Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei or ByteDance? They are the incumbents — established platforms with frontier models of their own. This report is about the independent challengers, the companies whose ownership is still being decided. The incumbents appear here anyway: as shareholders.
Source: WireScreen platform records, August 6, 2026, for the Chinese company in each case; MiniMax figures cover the whole group because its parent company is itself listed. Zhipu’s 30.2% is printed in its listing prospectus; other percentages are WireScreen look-through calculations from filed holdings.
Part two · What the filings cover
These companies were built with two layers.
Now some are dismantling them.
One thing to know before the ownership numbers. Most of these companies were set up with a holding company registered outside China — and that holding company files nothing in China. What Chinese records do show is the business itself. That is where the government’s shares sit.
Not in Chinese filings
The holding company, registered abroad
Usually incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with a Hong Kong company beneath it. This is where the venture investors and the founders’ own money are held, and where the company lists its shares if it goes public.
VENTURE MONEYIPO INVESTORSFOUNDERS’ HOLDINGS ABROADPUBLIC ONLY IF THE COMPANY LISTS
↓ beneath it sits the business itself ↓
What the filings cover
The Chinese operating company
The licensed, staffed, revenue-earning business, filed with China’s corporate registry under a legal name that often carries no reference to the brand. Its register is public — and it is where domestic shareholders, including government bodies, actually hold their shares.
LICENCESEMPLOYEESLEGAL REPRESENTATIVEDOMESTIC SHAREHOLDERSGOVERNMENT CAPITAL
Neither register is the whole company. The register abroad shows who financed the group but is generally not publicly available; the Chinese register is public but stops at the border. Every ownership figure in this report is built from the second kind — which is why it can include the government bodies the first kind never shows. The one exception is MiniMax, whose parent company is itself listed, so the full group register is public. And the structure itself is now in motion: under regulatory pressure on holding structures registered abroad, StepFun dismantled its two-layer structure in April 2026, Moonshot is reported to be weighing the same ahead of a Hong Kong listing, and Zhipu already lists as a China-incorporated company. Only MiniMax keeps a holding company abroad.
How to read every percentage in this report: WireScreen’s ownership figures are look-through calculations over the Chinese operating company’s register — each shareholder followed back to its ultimate beneficial owners — unless otherwise stated.
Source: PRC corporate registrations and exchange disclosures traced on the WireScreen platform, August 6, 2026. Stakes held through structures abroad do surface — through corporate registrations, listed investors’ disclosures and IPO filings — and several in this report are sourced that way.
Part two · The financiers
Tencent is betting on the field
it is competing against
The point is not how many investors the five have — it is how often the same ones recur. Tencent has invested in all five — directly or through vehicles — while shipping frontier models of its own; Alibaba is on three registers and is the largest outside shareholder of the one whose parent is listed. Across WireScreen’s entity records, the same few venture firms appear behind them again and again.
Neil Shen 沈南鹏 · HONGSHAN
His firm, spun out of Sequoia in 2023, sits on the registers of four of the five.
Duane Kuang 邝子平 · QIMING
Backed StepFun and Zhipu — and UBTech’s Zhou Jian, elsewhere on this list.
Richard Liu 刘芹 · 5Y CAPITAL
Backed StepFun; earlier, first institutional money into Xiaomi and an early backer of Horizon Robotics.
At DeepSeek the exposure is personal as well as corporate: WireScreen’s look-through records attribute 1.7% and 1.0% to Pony Ma and Xu Chenye, Tencent’s own founders. The three investors above were added to The Wire China’s roster by WireScreen because the original list carried only three financiers — and their firms were already on the registers of four of the five.
Source: WireScreen entity records and listing filings, August 6, 2026. A solid dot is a confirmed holding; positions from DeepSeek’s June 2026 round are shown as reported around the financing rather than from its register. Percentages are stated only where a filed or prospectus figure is quoted elsewhere in this report. Alibaba’s stake in Moonshot has been reported from the mid-teens to 36% and never company-confirmed, so no figure is given. HongShan’s Zhipu position is held via Xiamen HongShan Yaheng, per the prospectus.
Part two · Follow the state money
Moonshot looks entirely private —
until you follow the funds
Moonshot’s Beijing company has thirteen direct shareholders: its founder, investment funds and partnerships, Tencent. Read the register and you would call it entirely privately held. Follow each shareholder back to its owners on the WireScreen platform and a different company appears, one with state backing.
What the share register shows
0
Government bodies among the thirteen direct shareholders
Yang Zhilinfounder51.8%
A growth fundinvestment partnership11.8%
A technology-innovation fundinvestment partnership4.0%
Tencentvia an investment vehicle—
Nine further shareholdersindividuals and partnerships—
Conclusion a reader would draw: privately held.
What following each one back shows
18
Government bodies among more than thirty ultimate owners · 18.1% between them
National Council for Social Security Fund全国社会保障基金理事会7.4%
Shenzhen Municipal Finance Bureau深圳市财政局2.7%
SASAC of the State Council国务院国有资产监督管理委员会1.3%
Yangzhou Municipal People’s Government扬州市人民政府1%
Shanghai Municipal SASAC上海市国有资产监督管理委员会0.8%
Thirteen further government bodiesprovincial, municipal and district offices, 0.6% down to 0.1%
Recorded separately: state enterprises 4.5% and guidance funds 3.6% — kept apart, never summed.
None appear directly on Moonshot’s share register. Every one is reached through a fund or a partnership.
Zhipu: the visible version
Government bodies hold 4.9% of the listed company and Tsinghua University a further 3.5% — figures printed in its listing prospectus rather than reconstructed from filings.
DeepSeek: the smallest stake, the only vote
State ownership is just 0.28% — a national AI fund. But on the reported terms of the June 2026 round, that is the only outside stake that votes: the commercial investors took non-voting units and a five-year lock-up.
Source: Beijing Moonshot AI Co., Ltd. (北京月之暗面科技有限公司), USCC 91110108MACG2KBH8F. The left panel is the register as filed; the right is the result of following each shareholder back to its owners on the WireScreen platform, August 6, 2026. The 18.1% is the sum of eighteen look-through positions — computed rather than printed. State-linked insurers holding a further 1.8% are not counted here.
Part three · What it adds up to
Neither private nor state-owned
The question usually asked of Chinese technology companies is whether they are really private or really controlled by the state. Among these five, that is the wrong binary. Three kinds of capital sit in the same companies — in a different mix in every one of them.
Founder capital
Control remains extraordinarily concentrated
Liang Wenfeng holds 81.6% of DeepSeek’s Chinese company and paid for the lab out of a hedge fund he already owned; outside money came in without votes and locked up for five years. Zhipu makes the point differently — eight shareholders acting in concert. Even at listed MiniMax, weighted voting rights keep the founder in control with under a quarter of the shares.
Platform capital
Incumbents financing their challengers
Tencent has invested in all five, directly or through vehicles; Alibaba is in three. Both sell cloud and both ship frontier models of their own, which makes them competitor and financier at once. At DeepSeek the exposure runs to Tencent’s founders personally, in WireScreen’s look-through records.
State capital
Arriving later, through funds
None of the five began as a state-owned company. In the records examined here, state capital arrives afterwards and through partnerships rather than directly — eighteen government bodies reaching 18.1% of Moonshot’s Beijing company without one of them appearing on its register, and Shanghai state investors joining StepFun’s latest round. At DeepSeek the state holding is tiny, and it is the only outside share that votes.
For these companies, “private or state-owned?” is too crude a question. The more useful questions are who holds the economic interest, who holds the vote, which legal entity the stake sits in, and what lies behind the shareholder on the register — and those are answered in the filings.
Method and limits
Chinese corporate filings stop at the mainland company: percentages here describe the Chinese operating entity, not a founder’s economic stake in the wider group, except MiniMax, where figures cover the listed group. Look-through percentages — Liang Wenfeng’s 81.6%, Moonshot’s 18.1% — are calculated by WireScreen from filed holdings rather than printed on any document; Zhipu’s 30.2% is printed in its prospectus. Direct registered ownership, look-through economic interest and voting control are three different measurements, and this report labels which one each figure is. Ownership is not the same as control: votes, board seats, weighted voting rights and nominee arrangements can each break the link. The data is a snapshot, traced on the WireScreen platform on August 6, 2026, and several of these registers have changed hands repeatedly in three years. Each figure is graded internally as filed, measured, reported or assessed; the grades, full sourcing and known gaps are set out in the web edition. Valuations are market or last-round figures and are not audited.
Appendix · The fifty-five
Who’s who, in one line each
Identity lines are condensed from The Wire China’s February 2025 profiles; figures that have since moved — valuations, user counts, rankings — are omitted rather than updated.
● WORKS INSIDE AN INSTITUTION ON A U.S. GOVERNMENT RESTRICTION LIST, FEBRUARY 2025 ■ COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBER + ADDED BY WIRESCREEN
The model builders
Jiang Daxin 姜大昕 is chief executive of Shanghai-based open-source model company StepFun AI, which he co-founded in 2023.
Kai-Fu Lee 李开复 is chief executive at start-up 01.AI, which builds open-source models, and chairman of AI-focused VC firm Sinovation Ventures.
Liang Wenfeng 梁文锋 is the chief executive and owner of DeepSeek, an AI firm that develops open-source large language models.
Tang Jie 唐杰● is a co-founder of LLM developer Zhipu AI, where he led AI development.
Wang Xiaochuan 王小川 is founder and chief executive of Beijing-based Baichuan AI, which develops open-source large language models.
Yan Junjie 闫俊杰 is chief executive of Shanghai-based MiniMax, the AI model and video company he co-founded in 2021.
Yang Zhilin 杨植麟 is chief executive of Moonshot AI, the firm behind the Kimi chatbot.
Zeng Guoyang 曾国洋 is the majority owner and chief technical officer of ModelBest, which he co-founded in 2022.
Zhang Peng 张鹏● is the chief executive at Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology, or Zhipu AI, a company backed by the state as well as Alibaba and Tencent.
Zhang Yutao 张宇韬 is chief technology officer and co-founder of Moonshot AI, the firm behind the Kimi chatbot.
The platforms
Liang Rubo 梁汝波 is chairman and chief executive of tech giant ByteDance, a firm he co-founded in 2012.
Liu Qingfeng 刘庆峰●■ is the chairman and chief executive of iFlytek, the Hefei-based firm he co-founded in 1999.
Robin Li 李彦宏 is chief executive and chairman of Baidu, the firm he co-founded in 2000.
Tian Qi 田奇● is the chief scientist at Huawei Terminal BG, the telecom giant’s AI consumer devices unit.
Wang Haifeng 王海峰 is the chief technology officer and head of the AI group at internet giant Baidu.
Wang Jingdong 王井东 is the chief scientist specializing in computer vision at internet giant Baidu.
Yu Dong 俞栋● is a Seattle-based distinguished scientist at the global Tencent AI Lab, where he is vice general manager.
Zhang Pingan 张平安● is the executive director and CEO of Huawei’s Cloud Computing Technologies unit.
Zhou Jingren 周靖人 is chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud and a senior vice president within the larger Alibaba Group.
Zhu Wenjia 朱文佳 oversees AI development at TikTok owner ByteDance.
Silicon and machines
Chen Tianshi 陈天石● is the chairman and chief executive of Cambricon Technologies, an AI chipmaker that local media refers to as China’s answer to Nvidia.
James Peng 彭军 is chief executive of Guangzhou-based autonomous driving firm Pony.AI, which he co-founded in California in 2016.
Wang Xingxing 王兴兴 is the founder, chief executive and chief technology officer of Hangzhou-based robotics firm Unitree.
Yu Kai 余凯 is the chief executive of Beijing-based Horizon Robotics, the firm he founded in 2015.
Zhou Jian 周剑 is chief executive of Shenzhen-based Ubtech Robotics, which he co-founded in 2012.
The surveillance firms
Lin Dahua 林达华● is co-founder and chief scientist for AI infrastructure at SenseTime, an AI software company based in Hong Kong.
Xu Li 徐立● is co-founder and chief executive of SenseTime, the AI software firm he co-founded in Hong Kong in 2014.
Yin Qi 印奇● is chief executive of Beijing-based Megvii, the firm he co-founded in 2011.
Zhao Yong 赵勇● is the co-founder and chairman of DeepGlint, an image recognition company.
The money
Duane Kuang 邝子平+ is a founding managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, which he started in Shanghai in 2006 with the American investor Gary Rieschel.
Lu Qi 陆奇 is the founder of MiraclePlus, a Beijing-based start-up accelerator spun out of Y Combinator.
Min Wanli 闵万里 is founder and chief executive of NorthSummit Capital, a venture capital firm that focuses on injecting technology into traditional industries.
Neil Shen 沈南鹏+ is the founding and managing partner of HongShan, the firm that was Sequoia Capital’s China arm until it was spun out as an independent business in 2023.
Richard Liu 刘芹+ is a founding partner of 5Y Capital, the Shanghai firm known as Morningside Venture Capital until 2020; he was the first institutional backer of Xiaomi.
Zhang Hongjiang 张宏江 is the former chairman of the nonprofit Beijing Academy of AI, and a leading voice in China calling for AI regulation to ensure it remains under human control.
The academy
Andrew Yao 姚期智 (Yao Chi-Chih) is a professor of computer science at Tsinghua University, where he is dean of the College of AI.
Harry Shum 沈向洋 is council chairman and professor-at-large emeritus at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University.
The academy · continued
Qi Yuan 漆远 is a professor at Fudan University, where he is dean of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Industry.
Xue Lan 薛澜 is a distinguished professor at Tsinghua University, where he is dean of the Institute for AI International Governance and of Schwarzman College.
Yang Yaodong 杨耀东 is a professor at the Peking University Institute of AI, where he is deputy director of AI security and governance.
Zhang Bo 张钹 is a professor of computer science at Tsinghua University, where he has focused on AI and neural networks since graduating almost seven decades ago.
Zhang Linghan 张凌寒 is a professor at China University of Political Science and Law.
Zhang Yaqin 张亚勤 is the chair professor of AI science at Tsinghua University, where he is also dean of the Institute for AI Industry Research.
Zhou Bowen 周伯文 has led the Shanghai AI Lab, one of China’s top AI research institutions, since 2024.
Zhou Zhihua 周志华 is a professor at Nanjing University, where he is dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence, and author of the 2016 book Machine Learning.
Zhu Songchun 朱松纯 is a professor of computer science at Peking University, where he is director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
The state labs
Gao Wen 高文●■ is the founding director of the government-funded AI research institution Peng Cheng Laboratory and a professor at Peking University.
Huang Tiejun 黄铁军■ is a professor of computer science at Peking University and the former president of the Beijing Academy of AI, a state-run research institution.
Qiao Yu 乔宇 is lead scientist at the state-backed Shanghai AI Lab and a professor at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology.
Wang Zhongyuan 王仲远 is head of the nonprofit, state-controlled Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
Zeng Yi 曾毅 is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences studying and developing AI systems designed to operate as closely as possible to the human brain.
The policymakers
Ding Xuexiang 丁薛祥■ is the sixth-ranked official on the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top governing body.
Lin Xin 林新■ is China’s vice minister of science and technology.
Wu Zhaohui 吴朝晖■ is vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a deputy secretary in the Communist Party.
Yin Hejun 阴和俊■ has been the Chinese Communist Party Secretary at the Ministry of Science and Technology since autumn 2023.
Get briefings when they publish
New reports delivered to your inbox.