The investment community has learned about the latest financing—
AI startup Axiom, founded by Hong Letong, announced the completion of a $200 million Series A financing round, led by Menlo Ventures, with continued support from existing investors including Greycroft, Madrona Venture, B Capital, and Toyota Ventures. As a result, the company's valuation has reached $1.6 billion (approximately RMB 11 billion).
Hong Letong, 25 years old this year, was born in Guangzhou and attended the High School Affiliated to South China Normal University, where she won multiple awards in mathematics competitions. She later studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, and during her PhD studies at Stanford University, she chose to dive into the entrepreneurial wave.
The investment community had a private conversation with Hong Letong when Axiom was still in its underwater phase. She wrote a self-encouragement in her social circle during the founding of Axiom: &#34;Wishing myself to be both a flower and a tree. Colorful and passionate, standing alone.&#34;
<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://inews.gtimg.com/om_bt/OpEOKKr9hsivxNrIPQD6UJKKK7UfjUImbyeVi9IEzysLQAA/641?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://inews.gtimg.com/om_bt/OpEOKKr9hsivxNrIPQD6UJKKK7UfjUImbyeVi9IEzysLQAA/641"/>
Image Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Beyond individual choices, a more significant era is emerging, with post-2000 founders collectively stepping onto the AI stage.
Just raised $1.4 billion
Founded a year ago, valued at $11 billion
The story begins with a conversation in a café.
It was a weekend in late autumn 2024 when 23-year-old Hong Letong met Shubho Sengupta, then the Director of AI Research at Meta, at a café near Stanford.
During several hours of discussion, the two talked about the intersections of their research fields and how AI might solve some of the world's most challenging mathematical problems. Soon after, Hong Letong made a calm yet resolute choice: to drop out of Stanford and start Axiom.
The story of the genius girl always carries a halo. Soon, the name Hong Letong spread quietly and rapidly in the venture capital circle. At that point, whenever she shared her thoughts publicly, she rarely discussed trends and disruptions, focusing more on her curiosity about the problems themselves and her clear judgment of technological possibilities.
Now, Axiom has announced the completion of a $200 million Series A financing round, entering the unicorn ranks in less than a year since its establishment.
Just five months ago, Axiom had completed its seed round financing. At that time, this startup emerged, casting a firm belief to the outside world: mathematics is the correct foundation for building AI reasoning capabilities.
In December last year, Axiom's core system achieved a perfect score by solving all 12 problems in the Putnam Competition, known as the &#34;Undergraduate Mathematical Olympiad.&#34; It is worth noting that only five people have achieved this feat in nearly a century. Subsequently, the system independently proved several open conjectures in number theory
Solving mathematical problems is just the tip of the iceberg. Axiom is introducing this &#34;absolutely correct&#34; mathematical reasoning ability into the field of code verification through transfer learning, attempting to solve various issues related to generative AI.
Currently, the AI industry faces an extremely sharp contradiction: the capabilities of large models are skyrocketing, but reliability remains a black box. &#34;Nonsense&#34; in everyday applications may be harmless; however, in finance, defense, or critical infrastructure, any probability-based error could lead to disaster.
&#34;We are entering a world where artificial intelligence can almost write all software, but there is a problem that is rarely mentioned: all code is unverified, which poses a huge risk,&#34; said Matt Kraning, a partner at Menlo Ventures. He lamented that while artificial intelligence will write all the code, mathematics will verify its correctness.
Axiom's answer is Verified AI.
In simple terms, its core advantage lies in formal verification: by using the Lean programming language, it transforms mathematical proofs into executable programs, fundamentally ensuring the correctness of results. Here, large models no longer &#34;guess&#34; answers based on probability but convert code into strict mathematical logic to prove results. Every step of reasoning must pass the verification of a deterministic verifier.
&#34;Scientific breakthroughs often require two steps: proposing a hypothesis and then verifying it with proof. We founded Axiom to infinitely compress the time it takes to transform curiosity into truth.&#34; According to Hong Letong, AI's recursive self-evolution is just around the corner, and she left a highly charged note regarding Axiom's ultimate mission:
&#34;Verified AI is not just about fixing the shortcomings of AI. What it truly aims for is the upper limit of AI, the ladder to superintelligence.&#34;
A 00s female academic leading the team
From Guangzhou
The story of Axiom is inseparable from the extraordinary Hong Letong.
Born in 2001 in Guangzhou to parents from Chaozhou, Hong Letong displayed exceptional mathematical talent from a young age, attending the prestigious South China Normal University Affiliated High School. During high school, she was one of only four girls on the provincial math Olympiad team and achieved good results in competitions such as the Hua Luogeng Gold Cup and the National High School Mathematics League.
In 2019, she was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing dual degrees in mathematics and physics. Three years later, Hong Letong successfully received the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, becoming one of only four Chinese recipients. The Rhodes Scholarship is one of the oldest and most prestigious international scholarship programs in the world, often referred to as the &#34;Nobel Prize for undergraduates.&#34;
Subsequently, Hong Letong obtained a master's degree from the University of Oxford. During this time, she also conducted research on artificial intelligence and machine learning at University College London, where she expressed her interest in studying &#34;how will the interaction between artificial intelligence and scientists evolve in the future?&#34;
By August 2024, Hong Letong entered Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics and a J.D. &#34;I have always been a researcher,&#34; she stated in a previous interview, expressing her deep desire to solve genuinely difficult technical problems
Soon, while still pursuing her doctorate, she burst into the AI field.
When DeepSeek was booming globally, Hong Letong expressed her feelings: &#34;A small, focused, and unconventional team. An excellent partnership made up of idealists. They have strong execution and are hands-on. The most precious thing is the belief intertwined with ideals and missions. This is the story of DeepSeek, and it is also the story I want to write myself.&#34;
Now, Axiom has assembled a core team that can be called a &#34;dream team&#34;:
CTO Shubho Sengupta, former Director of AI Research at Meta, previously participated in research on Google's distributed training systems and is also one of the earliest experts in developing CUDA technology;
Core scientist François Charton, a pioneer who first introduced the Transformer model into the field of mathematics, once used a large model to overturn a 30-year-old unresolved academic conjecture.
The most shocking addition is founding mathematician Ken Ono. This authority in the field of mathematics, who has received numerous top honors including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Sloan Fellowship, and was a former vice president of the American Mathematical Society, resolutely resigned from his tenured position at the University of Virginia to join Axiom full-time.
A frequently recounted story is that during Ono's forty-year teaching career, he has mentored ten Morgan Prize winners, with Hong Letong being one of them.
&#34;She possesses a deep mathematical foundation, astonishing operational efficiency, and the ability to attract world-class talent,&#34; one investor couldn't help but exclaim: &#34;She is the most impressive founder I have seen in my twenty years in Silicon Valley, bar none.&#34;
Currently, Axiom has more than 30 employees, and the hiring pace is continuously accelerating. The story that belongs to her has just begun to be written.
AI Era
Post-00s Collective Debut
The wave of AI has become the main stage for the post-00s generation.
Just last week, Lingchu Intelligent, a company established for just over a year, announced that it has completed a total of 2 billion yuan in financing through its angel round and Pre-A round, with a luxurious lineup of investors. Its co-founder Chen Yuanpei, born in 2001, studied at Peking University and Stanford University, under the guidance of Fei-Fei Li.
There is also Yang Fengyu, founder of Youliqi, who is also a post-00s. He earned his PhD from Yale University and his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and has worked at DeepMind. Just last week, the company completed nearly 300 million yuan in a new round of financing.
This list goes on. The AI programming company Anysphere, founded by four post-00s, has reached a valuation of about 29 billion dollars; 19-year-old Chinese-American girl Serena Ge founded the AI data company Datacurve, raising over 100 million; the three 22-year-old co-founders of the AI startup Mercor have become the youngest self-made billionaires in the world
A more direct impact is the billionaire rankings, where AI has become the youngest track. The &#34;2026 Hurun Global Self-Made Billionaires Under 40&#34; list shows that there are 27 billion-dollar entrepreneurs in the AI field, accounting for a quarter of the total number on the list, with an average age of only 32 years and a combined wealth of nearly 700 billion RMB.
Witnessing the ebb and flow of the tide, more than one investor has expressed that this group of young AI entrepreneurs emerging in just two to three years has demonstrated maturity beyond their age in terms of vision, pattern, and resilience in breaking through challenges. They are arguably the most outstanding group they have seen since entering the industry. Some investors even candidly stated that if there are no core partners born after 2000 in the team, they might not invest.
Why must it be young people? Fu Jixun, managing partner of GGV Capital, once explained the logic behind it: &#34;Innovation in every era often comes from young people first because they have no burdens.&#34; Each era has its own innovations, and an era can also form a kind of inertia, even creating a burden. To some extent, today's AI represents an opportunity for those born after 1995 and 2000.
On the eve of technology reconstructing the world, having no burdens often means having the best baggage

AXINU

AXIN

The AI startup Axiom, founded by Hong Letong, announced the completion of a $200 million Series A financing, led by Menlo Ventures, with a valuation reaching $1.6 billion. Hong Letong, 25 years old, previously studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and chose entrepreneurship due to his passion for AI and mathematics. Axiom has rapidly grown into a unicorn in less than a year since its establishment, showcasing the rise of post-2000 founders in the AI field

First Release | 25-year-old Hong Letong leads the team, Axiom just raised 1.4 billion