Tencent gains a stake in an independent assistant that already plugs into WeCom, Tencent Meeting and WeChat Reading, run by the executive who led Doubao's PC product.
Today AI, the personal-assistant start-up of former ByteDance executive Qi Junyuan (齐俊元), has raised more than US$200 million in total, according to Pedaily, which published the announcement on October 21. Its backers include IDG Capital, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Ant Group, Sequoia China, smartphone maker Transsion, Tongge Ventures and Hanyuan Asset, an investment arm linked to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 36Kr carried the same figure and investor list in its morning news briefing.
The figure is cumulative. Neither Pedaily nor the technology outlet Zhidx, whose report was republished by Phoenix New Media, breaks it into rounds or gives a current valuation. Zhidx said the disclosure came from 5Y Capital and put the total at about RMB1.336 billion.
The money arrived quickly. Qi left ByteDance in November 2025, the company’s first funding was reported in March, and its assistant, called Today, went live for Chinese users on September 25. Pedaily said the company is working on a "个性化的主动式AI系统", a personalized assistant that acts before it is asked.
A Feishu and Doubao veteran with an earlier exit behind him
Qi’s record explains much of the investor interest. He founded the project-management software company Teambition in 2011 while a third-year student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Tencent made a strategic investment in 2016, and Alibaba bought the company in 2019 for about US$100 million, Zhidx reported. He then led Alibaba’s consumer cloud-storage product, Alibaba Cloud Drive, which launched in 2021.
He joined ByteDance in January 2023 as product vice president of Feishu, its workplace collaboration suite, reporting to Feishu chief executive Xie Xin. In January 2024 he moved to ByteDance’s Flow unit to run the PC version of the Doubao chatbot, according to Zhidx. He left in November 2025, after a September reorganization put Doubao’s PC and mobile products and model strategy under one executive, Zhao Qi. Pedaily and Zhidx both describe him by the two roles, as former Feishu product vice president and former head of Doubao PC.
The assistant is built around memory and connections to Chinese work apps
Today keeps a running record of a user’s work and daily affairs, such as schedules, project summaries, study plans and health information, and uses it to offer help unprompted, Pedaily said. The China version runs on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. Zhidx reported that it connects to WeCom, WeChat Reading, Baidu Netdisk, Kingsoft Docs and Tencent Meeting, so it can collect messages, track file changes and draft meeting minutes.
The links to Tencent services matter for an investor list that includes Tencent. WeCom, WeChat Reading and Tencent Meeting are three of the five integrations Zhidx named for Today, the assistant Tencent now backs. That gives the start-up access to the workplace data that a proactive assistant needs and gives Tencent a stake in an assistant that sits on top of its own apps.
The product took shape over the year. QbitAI, in a September 25 report republished by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, said Today was first shown in July while in internal testing. It described long-term memory that users can view, edit or delete, a morning brief and evening recap, and a cloud computer that runs tasks around the clock. QbitAI reported that Qi registered the Today.ai domain in 2014.
StepFun backed the company early but is missing from the latest investor list
The operating company behind Today is 此间无限 (Cǐjiān Wúxiàn), registered in Shanghai. Zhidx said it was founded in March 2026, with a team that planned to use models from StepFun.
Huxiu, republishing the data service IT Juzi, reported in March that the company announced a US$10 million angel round from IDG Capital and StepFun on March 6, at a valuation above US$100 million. Zhidx cited a separate March report of two completed rounds valuing the company at several hundred million dollars. StepFun does not appear in Pedaily’s October investor list.
The next indicator is usage. None of the reports gives user numbers, paying customers or revenue for Today. A first disclosure of active users, or a distribution agreement with one of its strategic backers such as Transsion, would show whether US$200 million of venture backing is turning into a business.