Mindverse raises ~$50M Series A led by Meituan, to open-source 750B GLM 5.1 agent model
What's the deal? Mindverse, a Chinese AI agent developer, has closed a Series A round of nearly $50 million led by Meituan, the tech and delivery giant. Yuanhe PuhuaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, ShokzDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Variable CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and existing shareholders also participated, with Gao Hu Capital as exclusive financial adviser.
The company was co-founded by Chen Kaijie and Andrew, whose core R&D team draws from DeepSeek, ByteDance Seed, and xAI. Mindverse focuses on building native agent models through post-training and continuous learning rather than relying on external prompt engineering.
Alongside the funding announcement, Mindverse said it will open-source a 750B-parameter agent model — a 744B pre-trained GLM 5.1 base plus 6B of LoRA adapters. It claims this is the first reinforcement learning post-training result built on GLM 5.1, achieving state-of-the-art results on four major benchmarks.
Why now? The AI agent space is heating up fast, with companies racing to move beyond chatbots toward autonomous systems that can take actions on behalf of users. Mindverse's technical approach — using LoRA as the foundation for continuous learning and parameterised memory — lets it reduce post-training costs to one-tenth of full-parameter training, a critical advantage as model sizes balloon.
The company's Mixture of LoRA architecture can mount thousands of independent "skill packages" on a shared base model, enabling rapid activation in seconds with clean privacy isolation. That makes it practical for enterprise deployment at scale.
What could go wrong? Mindverse operates in a fiercely competitive landscape. Chinese AI is crowded with well-funded players, and open-sourcing the 750B model — while good for adoption — means rivals can study and replicate the work. The company's consumer app, Macaron, has two million users and 100,000 daily actives, but converting that into sustainable revenue remains unproven.
Enterprise partnerships with Huawei Cloud and Microsoft Cloud add credibility, but Mindverse will need to demonstrate that its low-cost LoRA infrastructure can handle real-world business workloads reliably.
The signal: Meituan's lead role here is notable — as a corporate investor, it is betting that autonomous AI agents will become integral to the consumer and enterprise services it dominates in China. The syndicate's diversity, spanning an investment fund like Yuanhe Puhua alongside corporates such as Shokz, suggests broad conviction that post-training efficiency, rather than simply scaling pre-trained models, is the next competitive frontier. For Mindverse, still at the early growth stage, converting a two-million-user consumer app and cloud partnerships into durable revenue will determine whether this nearly $50 million buys a lasting lead or merely a head start.
Read more: cointime.ai
