Tsinghua University students in their 20s are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars for AI startups, with some launching companies while still pursuing doctorates.

Among the most prominent is Liu Songming, who founded physical AI startup LiberAI in late 2025 while pursuing a doctorate at Tsinghua. Liu was 23 when he started the company.

LiberAI, which is developing technology for robotics, autonomous driving and industrial simulation, has since completed six funding rounds in 10 months, raising more than 1 billion yuan (US$149 million), according to Chinese newspaper Securities Times. Liu had graduated at the top of his Tsinghua computer science class and won the university's highest student scholarship. His research focused on embodied AI, which seeks to enable machines to understand and interact with the physical world