Lin Junyang, the former technical lead of Qwen at Alibaba and one of the youngest P10 level engineers in the company, founded Pragmatik Labs in Shanghai. The company secured a two-billion-dollar valuation during its angel round. The round was led by Gaorong and HongShan, who each contributed $100 million, with Tencent investing $20 million; the Shanghai Future Industry Fund also participated.
This valuation was achieved without any data on products, user base, or revenue, which is typical for the top tier of AI talent market, although notable in China. Pragmatik Labs, known by its Chinese name Yuyong Technology, positions itself as a next-generation company operating at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
The company's website describes work on aspects such as reasoning, tool use, environmental interaction, and long-horizon task execution. Pragmatik Labs' business areas include digital agents for knowledge work and physical agents for real-world environments. No product has been announced yet. Lin personally controls the majority of the equity through related structures, while external investors hold 12 percent in the local operating company.
The career path leading to this valuation has unusual characteristics. Lin joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy in 2019 after obtaining his master's degree, worked on pre-training models M6 and OFA, and later became the technical lead of Qwen at the end of 2022. Qwen released its first open-source model in August 2023 and evolved into a family covering language, code, vision, and multimodal capabilities. By January 2026, there were over 200,000 Qwen-derived models globally, with cumulative downloads exceeding a billion.
Lin resigned on March 4th and published a long-form essay on March 26th titled 'From Reasoning Thinking to Agentic Thinking,' which defined the conceptual direction for Pragmatik Labs. The shift in focus from foundation models to agents is not just a rebranding. Lin argues that the next breakthrough in AI capabilities will come from systems that interact with the environment over extended periods, use tools, take actions, and correct them based on feedback, rather than from larger static language models.
While working at Qwen, he already established a robotics and embodied intelligence team in October 2025. Both these areas are now integrated into Pragmatik Labs. The company's valuation reflects a broader trend in capital where leading AI founders can achieve valuations before product launch. Investors cite Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, which raised $2 billion at a $12 billion early-stage valuation. Pragmatik Labs will require a product to justify its current valuation. For Lin, the challenge was not whether a Qwen-level model could be created at all, but whether a single architectural unit could build an agent company from scratch.
