Gasgoo Munich- On April 17, 01.AI has signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with AgiBot, a general-purpose AI robotics firm, according to a statement from the AI developer. The agreement will see the pair combine their strengths in enterprise agents and embodied intelligence to expand into the global corporate market.
Founded by Kai-Fu Lee in Beijing in May 2023, 01.AI is an AI 2.0 company.
Image source: 01.AI
Since its inception, the company has rolled out a series of open-source models. In November 2023, it released the Yi-34B pre-trained model with a 200K context window, which topped the HuggingFace open-source leaderboard. This was followed in March 2024 by the Yi-9B model, noted for its coding prowess. By May of that year, the firm introduced the closed-source Yi-Large with over 100 billion parameters, and in October, it launched Yi-Lightning, a lightweight flagship model ranked sixth globally. These models are accessible via API on Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope community and Bailian platform, alongside the company's Wanzhi AI work platform.
On the financial front, 01.AI achieved unicorn status—valued at over $1 billion—just eight months after launching. In 2024, it secured hundreds of millions of dollars in a Series A round backed by international strategic investors and Southeast Asian consortiums. Looking ahead, the company established a joint industrial large-model laboratory with Alibaba Cloud in 2025.
By 2025, the company had introduced an enterprise-level agent dubbed "Super Employee Wanzai," building AI solutions that span sectors such as government and finance.
