Apex Intelligence
Self-evolving AI models for scientific discovery.
The founders
YC
The company
Apex Intelligence is an AI research lab building self-evolving foundation models for open-ended scientific discovery. Its systems use recursive self-improvement: they generate hypotheses, run experiments, validate results and iterate on their own findings.
In September 2026 the company announced it had raised nearly $50 million in angel and angel-plus rounds co-led by investors including IDG Capital, LinkX Capital, XtalPi, Zhongguancun Science City Fund and Shenzhen Capital Group. It says the money will expand research, recruit talent and train its models.
Apex Intelligence was founded in June 2026 in Beijing by Yongchao Chen. The company says its system has produced research of a standard suitable for top AI conferences and a complete proof of a majorization conjecture that had been open for more than 30 years.
Chen is an assistant professor at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI, studied at the University of Science and Technology of China, and has research experience at Google DeepMind and Microsoft. The company says the wider team comes from Google, Microsoft and Amazon and from Tsinghua, Harvard and MIT.
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