Former Alibaba Qwen lead Lin Junyang launches Pragmatik Labs at $2B valuation

In the early hours of August 12, Lin Junyang, former technical lead of Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen, officially announced his venture: AI company Pragmatik Labs (语用科技, internal code p7k) in Shanghai.

He also publicly disclosed the company's research direction: focusing on next-generation agents that span the digital and physical worlds. The company has completed an angel round at a $2 billion valuation (about 13.5 billion RMB), raising $220 million, co-led by Gaorong Ventures and HSG (HongShan/红杉中国), with Tencent participating at around $20 million and the Shanghai Future Industry Fund providing support.

Lin said the new company splits its business into two segments: digital agents for office scenarios and physical embodied agents for real-world scenarios. Both product lines integrate reasoning, tool calling, autonomous learning, and coordinated action, anchored in world models and embodied intelligence. The technical map breaks down into four parts: Digital Agents, Physical Agents, Research-to-Product, and Long-horizon Exploration.

Lin Junyang was born in 1993, graduated from the University of International Relations with an English degree and from Peking University with a master's in linguistics and applied linguistics, making him one of the few technical leaders in China's large-model industry with a pure linguistics background. After his master's in 2019, he joined Alibaba DAMO Academy working on NLP and multimodal large models. After Alibaba's late-2022 organizational reshuffle that folded DAMO's AI team into Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Lab, Lin took over as Qwen's technical lead before age 30.

During his three years leading Qwen, he oversaw the launch of the trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max flagship, drove full open-source across the model family, with the open-source ecosystem exceeding 600 million downloads and more than 200,000 derivative models; the 72B variant long topped the global open-source large-model leaderboard. Lin was promoted to Alibaba P10 last year, becoming the youngest P10 technical expert in Alibaba history. On March 4 this year he posted "bye_my_beloved_qwen" on X and announced his departure.