Illustration: AI-generated · Inside China AI

ModelBest: The Chinese Model That Arrives in a Samsung Box

Part of The Model Layer — profiles of the Chinese model companies Europe is about to meet, starting with the ones speaking at Web Summit Lisbon. Company profile · 17 October 2026. First sketched in Six Companies Europe Hasn’t Met.

Thirty-eight million downloads by July, fifty million by August, according to the company — and not one European procurement decision behind any of them. ModelBest builds language models small enough to run on a phone, releases them under Apache 2.0, and has reached a deal to pre-install them on Samsung flagships. If that ships as reported, a Chinese model will sit in European pockets inside a Korean handset. Its co-founder and CEO, Dahai Li, speaks at Web Summit in Lisbon next month.

Origins and backing

ModelBest — 面壁智能, Beijing Mianbi Intelligent Technology — was founded in August 2022 as a commercial spin-off of Tsinghua University’s natural-language-processing laboratory, formally established by Tsinghua professor Liu Zhiyuan (Caixin). Li Dahai, previously chief technology officer and partner at the Q&A platform Zhihu, took over as chief executive in June 2023. The open-source side runs through OpenBMB, a joint Tsinghua–ModelBest initiative, which is why model cards carry both names.

The angel round in April 2023 was led by Zhihu, with Zhipu AI participating — a Tsinghua lab investing in a Tsinghua lab. Later rounds brought in Huawei’s investment arm Hubble, state-owned capital from Beijing, and in 2026 Shenzhen Capital Group and Inovance Capital. Per KrASIA, citing PEdaily, the company raised more than 5 billion yuan (about $740 million) in the first half of 2026 alone.

What they build

Everything ModelBest ships is designed to run without a data centre. The MiniCPM family spans roughly one to nine billion parameters: MiniCPM5-1B, a text model released in May 2026; MiniCPM-V 4.6, a 1.3-billion-parameter vision model the company says runs on a phone with six gigabytes of memory; and MiniCPM-o 4.5, a nine-billion omnimodal model for voice and video. In mid-October the company and OpenBMB released MiniCPM-V 4.7, a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates about three billion per token and, by the company’s account, decodes at over 13 tokens a second in three gigabytes of memory on an iPhone 17 Pro Max (company release).

The commercial product is the in-car agent SuperMate, which entered mass production in April in the Changan Mazda EZ-60 and is in Geely’s Galaxy M9; the company projects it in 300,000 production vehicles by the end of the year. At WAIC in July it added MiniCPM-Robot, an embodied-AI series, and it has a humanoid collaboration with Leju Robot — one of China’s Humanoid Seven.

Key numbers

Founded August 2022, Beijing (Haidian)
Funding More than 5 billion yuan raised in H1 2026 (PEdaily via KrASIA); latest round reported as a Series C+ in July 2026 with state funds, state-owned enterprises and carmakers (Caixin). Round sizes are not disclosed.
Valuation Conflicting. Above 20 billion yuan (about $3 billion) after the July round, per backer Shanghai Mejoy Capital, reported by the South China Morning Post and PEdaily; one secondary profile puts an earlier 2026 round at about 9.5 billion yuan. We report both; the company has confirmed neither.
Listing Private. Pre-IPO tutoring filed with the Beijing securities regulator on 11 August 2026, CITIC Securities as tutor (STCN); target is Shanghai’s STAR Market under its regime for unprofitable technology companies, by the end of 2026 (Caixin). Not Hong Kong.
Open weights Yes. MiniCPM-V code and weights are released under Apache 2.0 (OpenBMB on GitHub); MiniCPM 4 likewise. The repository also references a separate model-licence document we have not reviewed.
Headcount Not disclosed.

The European angle

Physical presence None that we could find — no office, no research site, no distribution partner in Europe.
European customers or partners None named. The route to Europe runs through other people’s products: Samsung handsets, if the pre-install ships; Apache-2.0 downloads from Hugging Face and GitHub, which no one counts by continent.
Hiring in Europe No. We found no European job postings.
Regulatory exposure The EU AI Act’s obligations for general-purpose models fall on whoever places the model on the EU market. Whether that is ModelBest, Samsung, or the European developer who downloads the weights is exactly the kind of question nobody has had to answer yet. Export-control exposure is limited: the models are built to run without the GPUs that are controlled.
What a European buyer would actually encounter A model you can download today, run on your own hardware under a permissive licence, and never sign a contract for — which also means no European legal entity, no support desk, and no one to call.

What we could not verify

The Samsung deal. KrASIA reported on 21 July 2026 that MiniCPM will be pre-installed on “several” Samsung flagships. Neither Samsung nor ModelBest has stated which devices, which model, or which markets, and we found no Samsung announcement. We treat it as reported, not confirmed.
Volkswagen. Several secondary sources, including Wikipedia, list Volkswagen among ModelBest’s automotive partners. We found no primary source — no release from either company, no vehicle named. We do not count it.
The valuation, for the reasons above: a threefold spread between reports, and no company confirmation.
The download figures — 38 million in July, more than 50 million in an August letter to staff — are the company’s own, uncounted by anyone else.

ModelBest’s Dahai Li speaks at Web Summit Lisbon, 9–12 November. We will ask the question above about Samsung in person, and publish the answer, or the absence of one, in our Web Summit 2026 coverage.

ModelBest website