China's AI boom turns students at Asia's top university into multimillion-dollar startup founders

Among the most prominent is Liu Songming, who founded physical AI startup LiberAI in late 2025 while pursuing a doctorate at Tsinghua. Liu was 23 when he started the company.

LiberAI, which is developing technology for robotics, autonomous driving and industrial simulation, has since completed six funding rounds in 10 months, raising more than 1 billion yuan (US$149 million), according to Chinese newspaper Securities Times. Liu had graduated at the top of his Tsinghua computer science class and won the university's highest student scholarship. His research focused on embodied AI, which seeks to enable machines to understand and interact with the physical world.

Liu is part of a broader wave of young Tsinghua researchers turning academic work into companies. Chinese technology news outlet 36Kr recently highlighted several Tsinghua entrepreneurs born after 2000 who have attracted major venture investment, some while still studying.

Among them is Qin Shentao, 25, a doctoral student at Tsinghua's School of Vehicle and Mobility who founded physical AI company OriginFlow in 2025. The company has raised more than 500 million yuan. OriginFlow is developing a neuromuscular wristband that detects a person's intention to move, generating real-world data that can be used to train robots.

Hu Yucheng, also 25 and a Tsinghua doctoral student, founded embodied AI startup LatentVerse in May after conducting foundation-model research with ByteDance's Seed team. Less than three months later, LatentVerse raised hundreds of millions of yuan in seed funding from investors including GL Ventures and robotics companies AgiBot and Robot Era. Hu's research focuses on helping robots predict how the physical world will change in response to their actions.

Tsinghua University graduates. Photo from the university's Facebook

A breeding ground for AI founders

Tsinghua, ranked first in Asia and 11th globally in the 2027 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, has a long record of producing technology entrepreneurs.

More than 1,000 companies have been founded by Tsinghua alumni, including over a dozen unicorns, Business Insider reported in April, citing market intelligence platform Tracxn. The university also pushes students into research early. Many computer science students join laboratories and work on academic papers while still studying, with some undergraduates publishing research at leading computer science conferences.

Zhao Litao, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute, told the publication that a "smaller but influential segment" of Tsinghua graduates moves into AI startups, often linked to university laboratories.

One of Tsinghua's most prominent recent technology entrepreneurs is Yang Zhilin, a computer science graduate who founded Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi chatbot. Its AI models have drawn attention in Silicon Valley for delivering advanced capabilities at substantially lower costs.

Yang graduated at the top of his class in 2015 before earning a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University and working at Google Brain and Meta. He founded Moonshot in 2023. Moonshot recently completed a private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion and is moving toward a Hong Kong initial public offering in the first quarter of 2027, Bloomberg reported.

Tsinghua's environment has also encouraged students to move between academic research and entrepreneurship. William Chen, 26, co-founder of Singapore-based AI startup Sapient Intelligence, said he chose Tsinghua over U.S. universities including Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech after visiting the Beijing campus before enrolling.

William Chen, 26, co-founder of Singapore-based AI startup Sapient Intelligence, said he chose Tsinghua over U.S. universities including Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech after visiting the Beijing campus before enrolling.

"We talked about doing research together, and to my surprise, it was not what I originally assumed it would be like," Chen told Business Insider in an interview published Oct. 7. "It was very open, and they had great infrastructure there to support student entrepreneurs."

He studied mechanical engineering at Tsinghua before co-founding Sapient Intelligence with fellow graduate Guan Wang in Singapore in 2024.