The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Happy Friday. China’s first unified outbound investment regulation took effect on July 1, restricting how technology can leave the country. The same week, 141 deals closed across seven sectors. More on those rules below.

Where the Money Went

141 deals across seven sectors. 24 disclosed exact amounts, totaling $2.2 billion (~¥15.6B), with most of the capital concentrated in a satellite mega-round and several hundred-million-dollar AI raises.

🧠 AI (26 deals)

Shengshu Technology (生数科技) closed a $500 million (~¥3.6B) B+ round for Vidu, its AI video platform. Tripo AI raised $150 million (~¥1.08B) in an A+ round for AI-generated 3D assets, its third raise in four months. DeepCtrls (深度智控) pulled in hundreds of millions of RMB with Jinko Solar as a strategic investor (covered below). MindRank (德睿智药) raised $52 million (~¥374M) for AI drug discovery, with its lead candidate now in Phase III (covered below). Below the growth rounds, a cluster of Pudong-backed seed and angel deals continued Shanghai’s pattern of systematic early-stage deployment.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (23 deals)

Starchens (星辰新能) led the sector with a ¥500 million (~$69M) B round backed by CITIC Securities Capital, ICBC Capital, and East Money, a lineup of securities and bank-affiliated investors more typical of pre-IPO rounds. The rest split between battery materials, hydrogen, energy storage, and specialty chemicals, with state-linked capital from Hefei, Nanjing, and Jiangsu backing early- and growth-stage rounds.

🔬 Semiconductors (22 deals)

Twenty-two deals, nearly all with undisclosed amounts. Sicreat (新美光) closed a ¥1 billion (~$139M) C+ round for CMP (chemical-mechanical planarization) polishing pads, a key semiconductor consumable (more below). EDA (chip design software), chiplet packaging, and optoelectronic chips each drew a handful of deals. Several semiconductor materials companies are raising in Suzhou, continuing that city’s emergence as a vertically integrated chip-materials cluster.

🤖 Robotics (18 deals)

RobotEra (星动纪元) closed a ¥1 billion (~$139M) B round led by Chengtong, a fund under SASAC (China’s state-asset regulator), part of ¥2.5 billion (~$347M) raised across three rounds in roughly 60 days. Morphi (墨奇智能) pulled in hundreds of millions of RMB in what is reportedly one of the largest disclosed angel rounds in China’s embodied-AI sector (AI designed to operate physical hardware like robots), with Alibaba and Tencent co-anchoring for a six-month-old company. Motorevo (泉智博) completed its seventh round in 18 months for humanoid robot joint modules.

💡 Frontier Tech (8 deals)

Two brain-computer interface companies raised in the same week: Gestala (格式塔科技), a non-invasive ultrasound BCI startup, closed a ¥442 million (~$61M) angel+ round (covered below), while NeuroXess (脑虎科技) raised an A+ round as it began Class III clinical trials at Huashan Hospital. QBoson (玻色量子) closed a Pre-IPO round and filed for IPO coaching (the formal process of engaging an underwriter to prepare a company for listing) three days later. SynMetabio (贻如生物), a synthetic biology company making cultivated leather for luxury brands, closed its A round with Ordos Group co-leading (covered below).

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (16 deals)

Changguang Satellite (长光卫星) dominated with a ¥5 billion (~$694M) strategic round, the largest single raise in the sector this week. The company operates 161 satellites, the world’s largest sub-meter-resolution commercial remote-sensing constellation. Space Pioneer (天兵科技) added ¥200 million (~$28M) in strategic capital. Kaipu Dynamics (开普动能), an eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) electric propulsion startup founded by a former Rolls-Royce division director, raised an angel round (covered below). Most of the remaining deals were seed and angel rounds for early-stage space-tech and low-altitude economy startups, including Ruiqi Deep Space (瑞启深空), a four-month-old constellation startup that raised ¥220 million (~$31M) at a ¥1.1 billion (~$153M) valuation from Suzhou state funds.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (28 deals)

Snapmaker (快造科技) raised ¥1 billion (~$139M) in a C round for consumer 3D printing (covered below). CLAWLAB (浪爪智能) raised hundreds of millions of RMB with miHoYo leading (covered below). Thinkhead (上海星合), a 17-year-old bootstrapped machine-tool manufacturer, took its first outside capital. Coffee robot maker InSpace/XBOT (影智科技) closed a B round. The rest spanned optics, precision measurement, industrial equipment, and microfluidics (tiny channels etched into chips to manipulate fluids for medical diagnostics and lab work).

Spotlight

Gestala (格式塔科技)

Angel+, ¥442M (~$61M), Valued at ¥4.2B (~$583M)

Non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interface.

Gestala was founded on January 1, 2026 by Peng Lei, who left NeuroXess (脑虎科技), the invasive BCI company he co-founded and ran as CEO, in late 2025. Six months later, he has raised a cumulative ¥570 million (~$79M) across two rounds for an entirely different approach: instead of implanting electrodes in the brain, Gestala uses focused ultrasound to read and modulate neural signals through the skull. The company has completed over 30 clinical cases targeting chronic pain, reporting 50% pain reduction. It aims to file for NMPA (China’s National Medical Products Administration, the equivalent of the US FDA) medical device registration by year-end, with certification likely around 2028.

Acoustic-wave noninvasive brain-computer interface. Source: Zheng et al., Research (2023), DOI: 10.34133/research.0200. CC BY 4.0.

Chen Tianqiao (陈天桥), the Shanda Interactive founder who has spent the past decade funding neuroscience research through his Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute, holds 25% equity through Shengda Cognition. In the US, Sam Altman-backed Merge Labs raised $250 million at an $850 million valuation four months ago, pursuing the same ultrasound-BCI thesis. The same week as Gestala’s round, Peng Lei’s former company began invasive human clinical trials at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai.

Huaying Capital (华映资本, lead), C Capital, and 11 others participated.

Announcement

Snapmaker (快造科技)

C Round, ¥1B (~$139M), Valued at ¥6B (~$833M)

Consumer 3D printers and desktop fabrication tools.

Snapmaker makes multi-function desktop machines that combine 3D printing, laser engraving, and CNC carving. The company has shipped over 100,000 units across 80+ countries, with the majority of revenue from overseas. Its U1 model set a Kickstarter crowdfunding record for the 3D printer category, raising ¥47 million (~$6.5M) in 12 hours and ¥150 million (~$20.6M) over the full 43-day campaign, with more than 20,000 backers. Revenue grew 10x year-on-year on the back of the U1.

The Snapmaker U1 mid-print. Source: Snapmaker.

The round was led by Cathay Capital (凯辉基金), a new investor, with existing backers Hillhouse, Meituan, and Shunwei over-subscribing at scale. TAL Education’s (好未来) venture arm also joined as a new entrant. This is the largest single financing in consumer-grade 3D printing in at least the past two years, putting Snapmaker’s valuation at ¥6 billion (~$833M).

Its direct competitor Bambu Lab (拓竹) was valued at over ¥10 billion (~$1.4B) after its 2024 C round, putting two consumer 3D-printing companies above $800 million in the same cycle. Snapmaker’s edge is hardware pedigree: founder Chen Xuedong (陈学栋) is a mechanical engineering graduate who worked at AECC’s Xi’an Aero-engine Research Institute before starting the company in 2016.

Announcement

MindRank (德睿智药)

B Round, $52M (~¥374M), Valued at ¥1.69B (~$235M)

AI-powered drug discovery, with China’s first AI-designed drug to reach Phase III.

MindRank uses AI to design drug molecules from scratch, then develops them through clinical trials. Its lead candidate, MDR-001, is an oral GLP-1 receptor agonist for weight loss, directly comparable to Eli Lilly’s orforglipron, one of the most closely watched drugs in global pharma. GLP-1 drugs (the class that includes Ozempic and Mounjaro) work by mimicking a hormone that tells the brain you’re full; most are injections, and the race to make an effective pill form is worth hundreds of billions in potential revenue. In January 2026, MDR-001 became the first AI-designed Category 1 new drug (China’s highest regulatory classification for an original compound) in China to enter Phase III clinical trials, with roughly 750 subjects.

MindRank’s Molecule Arts Platform (MAP): three-layer architecture spanning AI molecular design, automated wet-lab validation, and clinical intelligence. Source: MindRank / Sina

MindRank took MDR-001 from initiation to Phase III in about 4.5 years for approximately $23 million (~¥165M). Traditional drug development for a comparable molecule typically costs $300 to $400 million over 7 to 9 years. The company says AI cut its R&D costs by more than 60%, with the rest of the advantage coming from running a 40-person startup rather than a large pharmaceutical operation. The Hangzhou-based team holds 15 drug pipelines, 5 preclinical candidates, and 3 IND (Investigational New Drug, the approval required before human trials can begin) approvals, including a US FDA IND from December 2022.

Xeno Investment (谢诺投资) and SWS Capital (申银万国投资) participated.

Announcement

CLAWLAB (浪爪智能)

Pre-A (cumulative hundreds of millions RMB across multiple tranches)

AI-powered textile machines that turn a photo into a finished tufted textile.

CLAWLAB builds machines that use AI to convert a photograph or sketch into a pattern, then physically tuft it into fabric. Tufting is the process of pushing yarn through a backing material to create carpets, rugs, and textured textiles. The consumer textile-machine category has seen little new product development in decades. Founder Hu Wenxin (胡文鑫) previously built products at DJI and Meituan before starting CLAWLAB in Shenzhen in December 2022. The company’s first product, a consumer tufting gun, generated roughly ¥100 million (~$14M) in revenue over its first two years.

CLAWLAB’s AI-powered tufting gun with a finished textile piece. Source: CLAWLAB

miHoYo (米哈游), the Shanghai gaming studio behind Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, led the Pre-A3 tranche. miHoYo has been systematically investing in physical-world AI and robotics, and CLAWLAB’s AI-to-physical pipeline, converting digital designs into manufactured textiles, fits that thesis directly. Earlier tranches were led by Yuanjing Capital (元璟资本) and Sequoia China’s seed fund. Shunwei Capital also participated. The cumulative funding across tranches is in the hundreds of millions of RMB.

Announcement

SynMetabio (贻如生物)

A Round, over ¥100M (~$14M), Valued at ¥1.5B (~$208M)

Cultivated leather made with synthetic biology, already selling to European luxury brands.

SynMetabio engineers microorganisms at the gene level to produce bio-based leather materials with an 80% lower carbon footprint than traditional leather. A ShanghaiTech University spinout based in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang tech district, the company already has a French subsidiary (SYNMETABIO, based in Lyon) and reports that international orders, predominantly from luxury brands, account for roughly two-thirds of its business, with total orders approaching ¥100 million (~$14M). SynMetabio has also partnered with Anta, the Chinese sportswear brand, for three co-branded shoe drops (April 2025, November 2025, March 2026). The team has grown from 20 to 70 people, and its manufacturing capacity through joint-venture partners reaches 16 million square meters per year.

ANTA x Kris Van Assche sneaker made with SynMetabio’s Mulkol mycelium leather, launched at Dover Street Market Paris. Source: SynMetabio

Ordos Group (鄂尔多斯集团), the Inner Mongolian conglomerate known primarily for cashmere and coal, co-led the round with Heda Jinfu (和达金服). Ordos is actively diversifying into what China calls “new-quality productive forces” (新质生产力, a government term for advanced manufacturing and frontier technology sectors). Backing a synthetic biology company that could eventually supply bio-based alternatives to its own textile operations is a strategic hedge. SynMetabio’s CEO has publicly stated that 2026 is “year one of IPO preparation.”

Announcement

DeepCtrls (深度智控)

B Round, hundreds of millions RMB, Valued at ¥3B (~$417M)

Physical AI that optimizes energy infrastructure, already profitable.

DeepCtrls builds what it calls a “PhyAI” engine: physics-coupled AI models that learn the behavior of electromechanical systems (motors, compressors, cooling units, solar inverters) and optimize them in real time. Where most AI companies sell software to software companies, DeepCtrls sells software to factories, data centers, and power plants. The Nanjing-based company, founded by a team from Tsinghua University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, reports over 300,000 devices deployed, customers including TSMC, CXMT, Innolight, Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII/工业富联), Tencent, ByteDance, and CATL, and operations in more than 10 countries. Revenue is doubling year-on-year, and the company says it has been profitable since last year.

DeepCtrls product architecture: DeepSYS (system-level optimization), DeepBot (standardized edge products), and DeepChip (device-level control modules). Source: DeepCtrls

Jinko Solar (晶科能源), one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, came in as a strategic investor. SDIC Innovation (国投创新) and CMB International (招银国际) co-led. Sequoia China, Source Code Capital, and GLP Capital continued from earlier rounds. This is the company’s sixth round.

Announcement

Kaipu Dynamics (开普动能)

Angel (seed + angel combined), tens of millions RMB

Electric propulsion systems for eVTOL aircraft, built by a team that used to make them at Rolls-Royce.

Kaipu Dynamics was founded in 2026 by Zhang Qinyin (张嶔崟), who previously directed Rolls-Royce’s electric fixed-wing division, leading the Tecnam P-Volt and MDA1 EViator nine-seat electric aircraft programs. His two co-founders were chief engineers in Rolls-Royce’s UAM (Urban Air Mobility) and RAM (Regional Air Mobility) divisions. The company’s motor is rated at 130kW continuous (204kW peak), roughly the output of a mid-size car engine, with motor weight 20 to 30 percent lighter than comparable products. The team also includes senior low-altitude technology and airworthiness specialists from COMAC, China’s state aircraft manufacturer.

The Tecnam P-Volt, a nine-seat all-electric passenger aircraft whose propulsion system was developed under Kaipu Dynamics founder Zhang Qinyin’s Rolls-Royce division. Source: Tecnam

Rolls-Royce announced its exit from civil electric propulsion in November 2023 and shut down its electric propulsion unit in 2024 after failing to find a buyer, terminating contracts with Vertical Aerospace and Tecnam. The team that built those systems now sits in Quanzhou, Fujian, developing the same technology for China’s eVTOL market, which got a regulatory boost when a revised Civil Aviation Law took effect on July 1, 2026, writing “low-altitude economy” (低空经济) into national law for the first time. In June, AECC rolled out China’s first domestically built eVTOL engine. A Western company exits, its technical team migrates, and the receiving country builds the regulatory and manufacturing infrastructure to absorb the capability.

Led by Zero Capital (零以创投), with Xinding Capital (新鼎资本) following. Wealthfast Capital (唯快资本) served as financial advisor.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Motorevo (泉智博). A+++ round, tens of millions RMB, valued at ¥2B (~$278M). Builds joint modules for humanoid robots. This is the company’s seventh round in 18 months, led by Hillhouse’s GL Ventures (高瓴创投). Zhiyuan (智元机器人) and LinkerBot (灵心巧手), two humanoid-robot manufacturers, invested as strategic shareholders. Robot makers buying equity in their own component suppliers. H1 2026 shipments hit 120,000+ units, with 60,000+ in June alone.

RobotEra (星动纪元). B round, ¥1B (~$139M), valued at ¥18B (~$2.5B). Humanoid robot maker that has raised ¥2.5 billion (~$347M) across three rounds in roughly 60 days, with SASAC’s Chengtong Fund leading the latest. Shipping dexterous hands at thousand-unit scale to logistics customers processing 1,200+ packages per hour across five provinces. About 50% of revenue comes from overseas.

Shengshu Technology (生数科技). B+ round, $500M (~¥3.6B), valued at ¥13B (~$1.8B). Founded by Tsinghua AI professor Zhu Jun (朱军), chief scientist at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. Builds “world models,” AI systems that don’t just generate video but attempt to simulate physics. Two rounds totaling ¥5.4 billion (~$750M) in three months. Vidu platform serves 195+ countries and 4.2 million+ creators.

Morphi (墨奇智能). Angel series, hundreds of millions RMB, valued at ¥7B (~$972M). One of the largest angel-round financings in China’s embodied-AI sector, with Alibaba and Tencent co-anchoring for a company that is roughly six months old. Founded by an ex-Huawei “Genius Boy” (天才少年, a title Huawei gives to its top young recruits) and a Huawei veteran who co-founded iMile, a Middle Eastern logistics company. A pure conviction bet on team pedigree, with zero disclosed product traction.

Thinkhead (上海星合). A round, hundreds of millions RMB, valued at ¥1.5B (~$208M). A 17-year-old, profitable, bootstrapped machine-tool manufacturer taking its first-ever outside capital. Led by Wuliangye Fund (五粮液, the baijiu distiller), with Magmeet (麦格米特) following. The company says it is the domestic leader in form gear grinding machines, a precision manufacturing process used in automotive drivetrains, with over 1,000 customers it says include BYD, SAIC, and Geely. Its machines meet GB Class 1 precision, the highest accuracy grade in China’s national standards for grinding equipment.

InSpace/XBOT (影智科技). B round, hundreds of millions RMB, valued at ¥1.5B (~$208M). Makes autonomous coffee robots deployed in 22+ countries across 100+ cities, with over 1,000 units producing 4 million+ cups. Founded by a former Xiaomi VP, with reported angel backing from Zhang Xiaolong (张小龙), the creator of WeChat. Head-to-head with Kaye Technology (咖爷科技), which raised a comparable amount from Hillhouse and Meituan last month.

Changguang Satellite (长光卫星). Strategic round, ¥5B (~$694M), valued at ¥26B (~$3.6B). Operates 161 satellites, the world’s largest sub-meter-resolution commercial remote-sensing constellation. Investors include Changchun Development Group (长发集团), China Orient Asset Management (东方资产), and Lushi Investment (陆石投资). State-backed capital anchoring a strategic satellite asset ahead of a likely IPO.

QBoson (玻色量子). Pre-IPO, hundreds of millions RMB, valued at ¥10B (~$1.39B). Builds quantum computers that use photons (particles of light) instead of supercooled circuits to perform calculations. Closed its Pre-IPO round on July 3, then filed for IPO coaching with Guotai Junan Securities on July 6, three days later. The second pure-play quantum computing startup to begin IPO coaching, after Origin Quantum (本源量子) in September 2025. More in the IPO Factory theme below.

Sicreat (新美光). C+ round, ¥1B (~$139M), valued at ¥5B (~$694M). Makes CMP polishing pads, the consumable discs that flatten silicon wafers between fabrication steps. Led by Yuanhe Holdings (元禾控股), with Zhongping Capital (中平资本) and China Post Capital (中邮资本). Suzhou-based, part of the city’s growing semiconductor-materials cluster.

Starchens (星辰新能). B round, ¥500M (~$69M), valued at ¥2.5B (~$347M). New energy materials company whose investor syndicate (CITIC Securities Capital, ICBC Capital, East Money) looks less like a growth round and more like a pre-IPO pipeline. More in the IPO Factory section.

Guangyin Tech (光引科技). Pre-A round, ¥100M (~$14M), valued at ¥500M (~$69M). Builds spectroscopy instruments (devices that analyze materials by measuring how they interact with light). Led by Henan Gaochuang (河南高创), with CAS Star (中科创星), Xi’an Caijin (西安财金), and others. Notable for attracting state capital from multiple provinces into an early-stage round for hard-science instrumentation.

The Bigger Picture

The IPO Factory

On June 17, the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued Guidance No. 10, expanding the STAR Market’s (Shanghai’s Nasdaq-equivalent board for science and technology companies) “fifth listing standard.” This standard allows companies with no profits and no revenue to list, provided they meet a market cap threshold (¥4 billion / ~$556 million) and hold government-recognized core technology. The new guidance adds detailed review criteria for AI large-model companies, and a parallel update to the strategic-emerging industry catalogue named quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, robotics, hydrogen energy, embodied intelligence, and 6G as priority sub-industries for listing.

The STAR Market (科创板) at the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Source: Caixin

QBoson (玻色量子) closed its Pre-IPO round on July 3 and filed for IPO coaching three days later, the second Chinese quantum company to do so after Origin Quantum in September 2025. Starchens’ ¥500 million B round drew CITIC Securities Capital and ICBC Capital, both of which have PE subsidiaries that routinely take pre-IPO stakes in companies their parent institutions later underwrite. Changguang Satellite’s ¥5 billion round came from overlapping state investors. SynMetabio’s CEO publicly framed 2026 as “year one of IPO preparation.”

CXMT (长鑫科技), China’s largest DRAM (dynamic random-access memory, the main working memory in phones and computers) chipmaker, opens subscriptions for its STAR Market IPO on July 16, targeting a raise of ¥29.5 billion (~$4.3 billion). Its Q1 results: revenue of ¥50.8 billion (~$7.1B), up 719% year-on-year, net profit of ¥33 billion (~$4.6B). All five major bank asset-investment companies (ICBC, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, CCB, and Bank of Communications) hold stakes.

In H1 2026, bank-affiliated investment firms collectively backed 58+ hard-tech projects. STAR Market listings in the first half of 2026 rose 57% year-on-year to 11, with total IPO fundraising up 148%.

China is building a structured pipeline from venture capital to public markets for specific technology categories. The listing standards define which technologies qualify. The bank and securities PE arms invest early, building positions in companies their parent institutions will later underwrite. QBoson went from round close to IPO coaching filing in three days, following a conveyor belt that runs from angel round to public listing.

The One-Way Membrane

On July 1, State Council Decree 837 took effect, China’s first unified regulation on outbound investment. Article 13 bans transferring state-restricted or prohibited technology abroad by any means, including cross-border dispatch of technical personnel, organizing staff to work overseas, cross-border technical guidance, or cross-border training. The penalties under Article 27 include confiscation of illegal gains and fines of up to 1% of the offending outbound investment. Article 28 adds a ban on new outbound investment activity for one to three years.

Countries ranked by number of top AI researchers at NeurIPS. China overtook the US for first place by working location of lead authors. Source: NeurIPS, Paper Copilot, The Economist

Less than three weeks before Decree 837 took effect, the Ministry of Commerce, NDRC, and Ministry of Finance jointly issued a Foreign Investment Stabilization Action Plan (June 16, publicly released June 22). Among its 15 measures: improved support for foreign R&D centers in China, streamlined entry for high-level foreign talent, and a provision allowing qualified foreign-invested companies to raise capital through domestic listings. In October 2025, China introduced the K-visa, a five-year, multiple-entry visa for STEM graduates and researchers from recognized institutions, with no domestic employer required.

Technology flows in, but not out. The mechanism is talent. Kaipu Dynamics was founded by a team that built electric aircraft propulsion systems at Rolls-Royce in the UK, which exited the business entirely. DeepCtrls was founded by a team from Tsinghua and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. QBoson’s founder has a Stanford pedigree.

The talent pipeline extends beyond this week’s deals. An Economist analysis of NeurIPS 2025 found that the share of overseas-trained Chinese AI researchers who returned to China rose from 12% in 2019 to 28% in 2025. The Financial Times reported that three AI headhunters operating between China and San Francisco helped relocate more than 30 US-based researchers to China in the past year alone.

Two policies, opposite in direction, working in concert. One locks the door on outbound tech transfer. The other opens it for inbound talent and capital.

Supply-Chain Strategic Investing

Three deals this week share an unusual investor pattern. The lead investor in each is not a financial institution but a non-financial company that is also, or intends to become, a customer or supply-chain partner of the company it’s backing.

Jinko Solar’s production line in Chuzhou, Anhui. The solar manufacturer invested as a strategic backer in DeepCtrls this week. Source: Xinhua / Lu Hua

Ordos Group (鄂尔多斯集团), an Inner Mongolian conglomerate built on cashmere and coal, co-led SynMetabio’s A round.

Ordos has been diversifying into “new-quality” industries, and its 2025 annual report shows the company developing a synthetic biology project at its Qipanjing industrial base intended to integrate with its existing cashmere and chemical businesses. It’s backing a bio-leather company that could eventually supply alternatives to its own textile operations.

Jinko Solar (晶科能源), one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers, invested as a strategic investor in DeepCtrls’ B round. DeepCtrls’ physical AI engine optimizes the exact electromechanical systems that Jinko’s factories run on.

And in robotics, Zhiyuan (智元机器人) and LinkerBot (灵心巧手), two humanoid-robot end-product manufacturers, took equity in Motorevo (泉智博), their own joint-module supplier. As reported by Cailianshe, Zhiyuan is planning to produce tens of thousands of humanoid robots in 2026 and is already integrating Motorevo’s modules into one of its largest product lines. LinkerBot, which reports holding over 80% of the global dexterous-hand market, plans to bundle joint modules with its hands for integrators.

In all three cases, the capital comes with a purchase order. These companies are investing in their own supply chains, locking in access to components and capabilities they need to scale. In a market where H1 2026 embodied-AI funding alone totaled ¥93.5 billion (~$13B, up 5x year-on-year across 322 deals), the companies writing checks are increasingly the ones buying the products.

CXMT’s IPO subscription opens on July 16. A DRAM chipmaker with ¥33 billion in quarterly profit doesn’t need the fifth standard to list, but its sheer scale validates the STAR Market as the destination board for domestic hard tech. The dozens of pre-revenue quantum, BCI, and robotics companies now stacking their cap tables with the same bank-affiliated investors are betting that the fifth standard will do for them what profitability did for CXMT. The capital flowing in this week already has its exit route mapped.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Happy Friday everyone. Let’s get straight into it.

Where the Money Went

163 deals across seven sectors. 37 disclosed exact amounts, totaling $5.9 billion (~¥42.4B). Strip out Kling AI’s $3 billion debut raise and the remaining 36 deals still disclosed $2.9 billion (~¥20.8B). Robotics led on volume (37 deals).

🧠 AI (35 deals)

Kling AI’s $3 billion first external raise dominated the sector and the week (covered below). Several ¥1 billion+ growth rounds closed, including DexForce Technology and Tripo AI (both in Radar below), and Xellar Biosystems (耀速科技), whose organ-on-chip platform screens drug candidates on chip-based organ models (covered below). At the other end, a cluster of seed and angel rounds backed brand-new entrants. Klaren Intelligence (厘清智能), a startup building world models, raised several hundred million RMB with HongShan (红杉), Hillhouse, and Shunwei all on the cap table for a seed round. Founded in April 2026. Eighteen AI companies raised at valuations of ¥100 million (~$14M) or less.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (17 deals)

Mostly sub-¥100 million (~$14M) rounds across battery materials, energy storage, and specialty chemicals. Yingong Technology (隐功科技) raised ¥100 million (~$14M) in a Pre-A for nanocomposite materials, and Anputai (安普态) closed a near-¥100 million A round in advanced insulation, both backed by state-linked funds.

🔬 Semiconductors (31 deals)

31 deals, led by Gowin Semiconductor’s Pre-IPO (covered below). EDA, chiplet packaging, and MEMS sensors each drew 1 to 3 deals, alongside camera sensor chips and power management ICs. Qili Semiconductor (齐力半导体) raised ¥100 million (~$14M) for chiplet packaging at Zhangjiang, and Jiyi Semiconductor (集溢半导体) raised ¥130 million (~$18M) for analog chip design. State capital appeared in investor lists across the sector, with Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang government funds all active.

🤖 Robotics (37 deals)

The most active sector by deal count, with three mega-deals (AI2 Robotics, X Square Robot, and Boundless Motion, all covered in Radar below). Below those, the deals split between platform-backed humanoid companies and smaller startups building components, sensors, or manipulation software. Fifteen deals closed at valuations of ¥100 million (~$14M) or less.

💡 Frontier Tech (11 deals)

Eleven deals. SpinQ (量旋科技) raised ¥1 billion (~$139M) in a D-round for quantum computing (more in Radar below). Xinghe Fusion’s (星核聚变) ¥833 million (~$116M) debut was the largest first-round raise in Chinese private fusion, backed by 25 investors including SAIC Motor. Two other fusion companies also raised this week, Andong Jubian (安东聚变) and Chaoci Xinneng (超磁新能), making it a three-fusion-deal week. SynSense (时识科技) closed several hundred million RMB for neuromorphic chips, event-driven processors that react only to changes in a scene rather than analyzing every frame, cutting power consumption for always-on cameras and sensors.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (8 deals)

Eight deals, dominated by Hongqing Technology’s ¥1.3 billion (~$181M) Pre-B for its satellite constellation (covered below). Puxing Aerospace (谱星航天) raised several hundred million RMB across combined rounds for optical remote-sensing payloads, with plans for a 1,024-satellite constellation.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (24 deals)

24 deals spanning optoelectronics, industrial equipment, and consumer hardware. Sinoscience Fullcryo’s ¥1 billion (~$139M) Pre-IPO for cryogenic equipment (covered below) was the sector’s largest. CAYE raised ~¥400 million (~$56M) in a B-round for coffee machines (covered below). At the other end, AIVELA raised several million dollars for its smart ring.

Spotlight

Kling AI (可灵AI)

First External Round, $3B (~¥21.6B), Valued at ~$18B (~¥129.6B)

Kuaishou’s video generation platform raised its first outside capital, with $500M in annualized revenue and a Hong Kong IPO planned within 12 months.

Kling AI is a video and image generation platform spun out of Kuaishou (快手), China’s second-largest short-video app. Users type a text description or upload a photo, and the system generates video clips, still images, or edited versions of existing footage. Kling 3.0, launched globally in February 2026, handles text-to-video, image-to-video, and post-production editing across web, mobile app, mini-programs, and international markets. The platform is known for strong human-motion realism, a persistent weakness in competing systems.

Until this round, Kling was wholly internal to Kuaishou, developed and funded as a product line within the parent company since 2023. Kuaishou registered two wholly-owned subsidiaries in April 2026 to house the spin-off and filed a disclosure with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May. Tencent was among the investors. General Atlantic is reportedly in talks, per Bloomberg.

Q1 2026 revenue exceeded ¥650 million (~$90M), up over 300% year-on-year. The company discloses annualized revenue of approximately $500M. The platform reports over 60 million global users, 30,000+ enterprise API clients (businesses that plug Kling’s video generation into their own products), and over 600 million videos generated to date. Approximately 70% of revenue comes from overseas subscriptions and enterprise API services. Goldman Sachs has projected 2026 annual revenue exceeding $1 billion.

Kling competes directly with OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, Runway, and domestically with ByteDance’s Jimeng (即梦), MiniMax’s Hailuo (海螺), and Alibaba’s Tongyi Wanxiang (通义万相).

This is the second Kuaishou spinout to raise in consecutive weeks. Transtreams, whose SL200 video compression chip placed first in independent benchmarks and has shipped 100,000 units, raised last week. Two separate entities, but together they represent Kuaishou externalizing its video AI stack, from the model that generates the content to the chip that compresses and serves it.

Announcement

CAYE (咖爷科技)

B Round, ~¥400M (~$56M), Valued at ¥2B (~$278M)

Commercial coffee-machine maker with the sector’s largest-ever single financing round.

CAYE makes fully automatic commercial coffee machines, the kind that produce hundreds of cups an hour in chain cafes, airports, and hotel lobbies. Founded in late 2022 in Suzhou by Wu Peng, a former co-founding team member at Dreame Technology (the robot vacuum company at the center of a government-fund controversy in June), the company has built its own ceramic grinding disc and an automated dosing system that it says improved dosing accuracy by 83%, to within ±0.2 grams per shot. Its top-end Smart X Master model produces up to 429 cups per hour.

This is the largest single financing round in the commercial fully-automatic coffee-machine sector, per both PEdaily and 36Kr. For context, De’Longhi acquired Swiss competitor Eversys in 2021 for approximately $160 million (~¥1.15B), and Eversys was a mature business at the time. CAYE is three years old, claims to operate in 80+ countries and count Peet’s Coffee and Tim Hortons among its clients (though those names come from company press materials, not the chains themselves), and holds over 300 patent applications, competing in a market dominated by European incumbents: WMF, Franke, and Thermoplan.

Meituan Longzhu (美团龙珠, lead), Bairui Capital (柏睿资本), GL Ventures, and others. Meituan Longzhu has now led three consecutive CAYE rounds, a sustained strategic bet from China’s largest food delivery platform.

Announcement

Gowin Semiconductor (高云半导体)

Pre-IPO, Hundreds of Millions of RMB, Valued at ¥1.5B (~$208M)

China’s first automotive-grade FPGA maker, now on the path to a STAR Market listing.

Gowin Semiconductor designs FPGAs, programmable chips that can be reconfigured after manufacturing to perform different functions. The global market is dominated by three Western firms: AMD/Xilinx (~51%), Intel/Altera (~29%), and Lattice (~7%).

Founded in Guangzhou in 2014, Gowin was the first Chinese company to pass AEC-Q100, the industry test that proves a chip can survive the heat, cold, and vibration of a moving car. At least two domestic competitors (Anlogic and Pango Micro) have since followed, but Gowin’s head start and product breadth (100+ chip models across the Arora, LittleBee, and GoBridge families) give it the deepest lineup. The company has offices in Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Exeter, San Jose, Austin, Tokyo, and Ho Chi Minh City. China’s securities regulator accepted Gowin into the mandatory pre-listing review process for the STAR Market, Shanghai’s stock exchange board built specifically for high-growth tech companies, in May 2026.

13 investors, 7 of them Guangzhou district and city-level state funds. More on what the State Council’s new rules mean for syndicates like this in The Bigger Picture below.

Announcement

AIVELA

A Round, Several Million Dollars, Valued at ~¥97.5M (~$14M)

A smart ring that proved global demand through crowdfunding before raising from VCs.

AIVELA makes a smart ring with 8 touch sensors and 6 gesture controls. A tiny optical sensor tracks fingertip movement like a mouse’s laser, so a thumb-flick on the ring can scroll a screen. Alongside that, a light-based sensor measures blood flow to calculate heart rate, a motion chip detects tilts and gestures, and a temperature sensor rounds out the package. The product lets users control phone functions, answer calls, navigate presentations, and track health data, all from a ring. The team began work in 2024; the company was formally incorporated in Shenzhen in April 2025 by Li Donghao, a Peking University and Cornell graduate who previously co-founded e-bike company URTOPIA.

Before approaching VCs, AIVELA ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $865,198 from 5,349 backers (1,730% of its $50,000 goal), then launched on Makuake, Japan’s largest crowdfunding platform, where it pulled in over ¥30 million (~$210,000) within 24 hours. Japan was a deliberate second market. Makuake functions more like a pre-order site than a pitch platform, and Japanese consumers are early adopters of compact wearable hardware. Over 10,000 units were sold through crowdfunding. The company reportedly reached profitability before this round. That sequence, proving consumer demand internationally and reaching profitability before raising institutional capital, inverts the usual sequence of raising VC first, then finding out whether anyone wants the product.

Linear Capital (线性资本, lead), Fengling Capital (锋领资本), URTOPIA (the founder’s prior company), and others.

Announcement

Xellar Biosystems (耀速科技)

A+ Round, ~¥200M (~$28M), Valued at ¥2B (~$278M)

Organ-on-chip platform with FDA participation and pharma clients on 3 continents.

Xellar Biosystems builds organ-on-chip systems, small devices that simulate human organs on microchips using living cells. Instead of testing a new drug on an animal or waiting for human clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies can run early tests on these chip-based models of hearts, livers, lungs, or tumors. The technology does not replace clinical trials, but it can filter out failing drug candidates earlier, potentially saving years and hundreds of millions of dollars per program.

Founded in late 2021 in Boston by Xin Xie (PhD Northeastern University, research fellowship at Harvard/Brigham and Women’s Hospital), Xellar operates from dual headquarters in Boston and Beijing with additional offices in Shenzhen. The company is the sole Chinese participant in a nine-platform study run by a consortium focused on replacing animal testing with lab-grown alternatives, accepted into the FDA’s ISTAND program (Innovative Science and Technology Approaches for New Drugs) in January 2026, a regulatory pathway that could help organ-on-chip data gain broader acceptance in drug applications. Xellar lists Sanofi, Pfizer, and L’Oréal among its clients, though these names come from company materials, not the pharma companies themselves. Cumulative A-series financing has reached approximately ¥400 million (~$56M).

Oriental Fortune Capital (东方富海), GF Xinde (广发信德), Yunbai Capital (沄柏资本), Guofang Ventures (国方创投), Qingsong Capital (清松), and others.

Announcement

Sinoscience Fullcryo (中科富海)

Pre-IPO, ¥1B (~$139M), Valued at ~¥10B (~$1.39B) per ITJuzi

The only Chinese company with full independent IP in large-scale cryogenic refrigeration, now IPO-bound.

Sinoscience Fullcryo builds large-scale cryogenic refrigeration systems, equipment that cools gases to temperatures between 2 and 20 kelvin (roughly -271°C to -253°C). At those temperatures, hydrogen liquefies for storage and transport, helium becomes a superfluid, and superconducting magnets function for fusion reactors and quantum computers. The company is described by state media as the third entity globally, and the only Chinese one, with full independent intellectual property across the cryogenic chain, after Linde and Air Liquide.

Founded in August 2016 as a spinout from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Physics and Chemistry. Revenue reached ¥740 million (~$103M) in 2024. The company exported China’s first large-scale hydrogen-liquefaction unit (1.5 tons per day) to Canada in January 2022. STAR Market (科创板) IPO coaching began in October 2025 with Zhongtai Securities as underwriter, after the company abandoned an earlier plan to list in Hong Kong.

CAS Capital (国科资本), the investment arm of CAS Holdings, led the round. The academy’s own investment vehicle backing its own spinout at the pre-IPO stage. Prior rounds include a ¥300 million (~$42M) B-round from Sinopec Capital (2022) and an ¥800 million (~$111M) C-round at a post-money valuation of ¥7.8 billion (~$1.08B) in 2023.

Announcement

Hongqing Technology (鸿擎科技)

Pre-B, >¥1.3B (~$181M), Cumulative >¥2.5B (~$347M), Valued at ¥7.8B (~$1.08B)

Backed by a rocket company, this satellite subsidiary builds its own propulsion, power systems, and electronics, filing for a 10,000-satellite constellation.

Hongqing Technology is building a satellite constellation of 10,000 satellites spread across 160 separate orbital paths around Earth (so the constellation can deliver continuous coverage instead of clustering all satellites along a single track), filed in May 2024 with the International Telecommunication Union, the UN body that allocates orbital slots and radio frequencies, a mandatory step before any company can legally operate a satellite network at that scale.

Hongqing is a subsidiary of LandSpace (蓝箭航天), the Chinese private rocket company that operates the Zhuque-2, the world’s first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit. LandSpace holds a majority stake (reported combined holdings above 50%), with CEO Zhang Changwu serving as Hongqing’s chairman. The company was founded in November 2017, longer ago than most satellite startups, and manufactures its own propulsion (Jinwu, with 4,089 ignitions at 100% success rate per company site), power systems (Chiyu solar arrays), and satellite electronics (Baize). A Xiong’an manufacturing base can produce over 100 flat-panel satellites per year. A test satellite launched from Xichang on May 31, 2026 via a Long March 2D.

One entity builds the rockets, a subsidiary builds and operates the satellite network. The filing makes Hongqing China’s third megaconstellation after the state-backed Guowang (国网) and Shanghai’s Qianfan/G60 (千帆). The difference is that Hongqing can price its own launches through its parent company, a cost advantage that state-operated constellations using commercial launch providers do not have.

CCB Investment (lead), ICBC Capital, Jinpu Capital (金浦资本), and others. 18 investors in total.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

AI2 Robotics (智平方). C round, ~¥5B (~$694M), valued at >¥20B (~$2.78B). The Greater Bay Area’s highest-valued privately-held embodied-AI company raised from 26 institutional investors. Its AlphaBot humanoid robots are in early mass production at over 100 units per month, with a verified ¥500 million three-year order from HKC (惠科) for semiconductor display production lines.

X Square Robot (自变量机器人). C round, valued at >¥20B (~$2.78B). The only Chinese embodied-AI company to have received investment from all 4 major platforms across successive rounds: Meituan, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Xiaomi (corroborated by 每经网, 新华网, 财联社). China Mobile joined in the C round. The company has deployed robotic arms on a German auto-parts production line and in a domestic home-services pilot with 58.com.

Tripo AI (生数科技/VAST). A3 round (per PEdaily; ITJuzi categorizes as A+), >¥1B (~$139M), valued at ¥10B (~$1.39B). A platform that generates 3D digital models from text or photos, used by game studios, e-commerce sellers, and product designers, with over 2 million creators and 700+ enterprise customers, per company materials. Founder Song Yachen previously co-founded MiniMax. This was VAST’s second round in 30 days.

SpinQ (量旋科技). D round, ¥1B (~$139M), valued at ¥10B (~$1.39B). Builds superconducting quantum computers and has shipped systems to over 200 customers in 40+ countries. Third round in 2026, bringing total funding raised this year to approximately ¥2 billion (~$278M).

Boundless Motion (无界动力). Angel (cumulative), >$200M (~¥1.44B). Mass-producing the K15 dual-arm wheeled robot. Verified global orders include ZF LIFETEC (Germany) and Ormowell Group. Founded by Zhang Yufeng, former VP of Horizon Robotics. JD, C Capital, and Hony Capital among the investors in this latest tranche.

DexForce Technology (跨维智能). B round, ¥1B (~$139M), valued at >¥10B (~$1.39B). Over 1,500 robotic units deployed on factory floors and H1 2026 revenue of ¥100 million (~$14M). Confirmed clients include Midea, GAC Aion, Zoomlion, and Lens Technology.

Lexiang Technology (乐享科技). Pre-A, ~¥500M (~$69M), valued at ¥3.5B (~$486M). Home robotics brand (元点 Zeroth) with a 30,000+ unit backlog and H1 2026 revenue up 600% year-on-year, per PEdaily. Ant Group (lead) and Geely Capital among the investors.

Xinghe Fusion (星核聚变). First round, ¥833M (~$116M), valued at ¥3B (~$417M). The largest debut raise in Chinese private fusion. Most fusion companies use a tokamak; Xinghe is building a quasi-isodynamic stellarator instead, a more geometrically complex magnetic design that trades harder engineering for potentially steadier plasma control. Founded November 2025 in Hefei. 25 institutional investors including SAIC Motor and Shenzhen Capital Group.

Discover Robotics (求之科技). Angel, >$100M (~¥720M), valued at ¥3.9B (~$542M). A Tsinghua spinout building the AIRBOT series, wheeled robots with two arms that can grasp and move objects. Founded by Zhou Guyue, who led the DJI Mavic drone product line before joining Tsinghua as a professor. PEdaily called this the record angel round in the consumer embodied-robot sector.

SynSense (时识科技). B+ round, several hundred million RMB, valued at ¥5B (~$694M). Neuromorphic chip maker with dual headquarters in Shanghai and Zurich. Its Speck chip is in mass production for edge sensing. Acquired Swiss sensor company iniVation in 2024 and counts Samsung as a strategic investor.

Primelife Science (璞睿生命科技). A round, ~¥100M (~$14M), valued at ¥500M (~$69M). AI-powered clinical trial platform that counts 7 of the global top 10 pharmaceutical companies as clients, per company materials. Co-founded with IQVIA. CICC Capital (中金资本) and Sumitomo Corporation Asia Capital (住友商事亚洲资本) participated.

The Bigger Picture

The State Capital Squeeze

In early June, the State Council issued Document No. 54 (reposted by the securities regulator), a set of rules that for the first time explicitly bars counties and districts from establishing new government investment funds without approval from higher levels of government. Government investment funds are public money that local governments invest into private startups, often requiring the startup to build a factory or office locally in return, to seed the tech industries they want in their region. The operative text: “严控新设政府投资基金，县区原则上不得新设” (strictly control the establishment of new government investment funds; counties and districts shall in principle not establish new ones).

By 2025, China had set up over 2,100 government guidance funds with target capital of approximately ¥11 trillion (~$1.53 trillion). In one central province, for example, over 60% of counties had established their own funds competing for the same deals.

The most visible case was Dreame Technology (追觅科技), the robot vacuum maker whose ambitions outran its core business.

Dreame’s Sky Factory Venture Capital Fund manages ¥41.6 billion (~$5.8B), with approximately 80% drawn from local government industry funds across cities including Suzhou, Xiamen, Shaoxing, Hangzhou, and Chengdu. Through a four-layer corporate structure, the company has spawned 955 affiliated entities. Of the 101 entities Dreame directly controls, roughly 72% were registered in the past two and a half years. Founder Yu Hao’s Weibo account was suspended in early June. The pattern echoes the over ¥15 billion (~$2.1B) Wuhan Hongxin semiconductor failure from 2020, where local government capital funded an ambitious chip project that collapsed.

Gowin Semiconductor’s Pre-IPO syndicate included 7 Guangzhou district and city-level state funds, local government vehicles backing a company in their jurisdiction, often competing with neighboring cities for the same technologies. Compare that to Sinoscience Fullcryo’s Pre-IPO, led by CAS Capital, the investment arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a national institution with deep technical expertise in the exact cryogenics technology it is backing. The State Council’s rules do not retroactively block existing investments, and they do not ban government capital from startups. They pull oversight upward, from counties to provinces, from local officials to central institutions. For founders, the money is still there, but the path to it now runs through fewer, larger, more selective gatekeepers.

Spinning Out the Stack

This week’s largest deal was a spinout. Kling AI raised $3 billion after Kuaishou separated it into two wholly-owned subsidiaries in April. A week earlier, Transtreams, another Kuaishou spinout, raised for its video compression chip. Two separate entities capitalizing different layers of the same video AI stack.

Sinoscience Fullcryo is a 2016 spinout from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, now at Pre-IPO with CAS’s own investment arm leading the round. Hongqing Technology is a LandSpace subsidiary that builds the satellites its parent’s rockets carry, raising separately with state-bank affiliates leading. Because LandSpace built the launch vehicle, Hongqing can price its own launches at cost rather than buying rides. Discover Robotics, a Tsinghua spinout, raised a $100 million angel round.

Four established organizations this week, a tech platform, a national research institute, a rocket company, and a university, each externalized internal capabilities and raised capital for them separately.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

A quarter of Xinjiang’s annual generation is exported east across transmission lines, capturing generation revenue but little else for the province. Much of the renewable surplus beyond that is curtailed: the transmission lines are at capacity and local demand is too low to absorb it.

Renewables account for over three-quarters of Xinjiang’s installed power capacity but only a quarter of its actual generation: wind and solar produce intermittently, and when they do, there is often nowhere for the power to go. Of what is exported east, less than a third is green.

A policy framework introduced in China’s 2026 government work report proposes capturing some of that surplus by converting electricity into AI compute. The framework is called 算电协同 (”compute-power coordination”) and Xinjiang is the first pilot region.

If all goes to plan, Xinjiang aims to reach 60 exaflops of compute capacity by the end of this year, with construction underway across four cities.

AI’s power problem

For most of the past few years, AI infrastructure headlines centered on chip supply, but that constraint is easing. Nvidia has scaled production, hyperscalers are deploying custom silicon, and China’s Huawei shipped the Ascend 950PR in Q1 2026 with roughly 2.8x the inference throughput of Nvidia’s H20 and its own domestically produced HBM. Government mandates require at least 80% domestic AI chips across the planned data center buildout.

Memory remains tight globally: SK Hynix and Samsung still control over 95% of HBM supply outside China, and Chinese memory maker CXMT’s placement on the Pentagon’s 1260H list has complicated supply chains enough that Apple is lobbying the White House for guarantees it can continue sourcing from the company. But the harder constraint is power.

In the US, new grid connections can take years. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Elon Musk warned that the industry would soon be “producing more chips than we can turn on.” He put it bluntly: “The limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power.” He added: “except for China.”

In the US, over 2,000 GW of generation and storage capacity is waiting to connect to the grid. The median project that reached commercial operation in 2025 spent over five years in the queue. The International Energy Agency estimates that around 20% of planned data center projects could be at risk of delays. FERC responded in June with orders to fast-track data center grid connections, but new facilities may still need to bring their own power or pay for grid upgrades.

Pent-up energy

China generates more than twice as much electricity as the United States. BloombergNEF projects it will add almost six times US electricity generation capacity over the next five years. A lot of that will be renewables. In 2025 alone, China increased wind and solar capacity by over 430 GW, more than half of all global renewables additions that year.

Much of this capacity is concentrated in western provinces, where land is vast, populations are sparse, and wind and solar resources are among the strongest in the country. Xinjiang’s geography makes the case: 1.66 million square kilometres of mostly arid basin and steppe, flanked by the Tianshan mountains, with some of China’s highest solar irradiance and wind corridors like Dabancheng that rank among the country’s best. There is plenty of room for turbines and panels, and plenty of wind and sun to power them. But local demand is thin.

Xinjiang crossed 100 GW of wind and solar installed capacity at the end of 2024, a first for Northwest China. Including hydro and other renewables, total clean energy capacity reached 173 GW within a total grid capacity of 219 GW by mid-2025. But the province’s ability to use all that power locally has lagged behind its ability to generate it. Conditions have improved from historical lows, but not enough: as of early 2025, only 67.6% of available renewable generation was actually used, meaning a third still went to waste.

The traditional solution has been to export the surplus east via ultra-high-voltage DC transmission lines: Hami-Zhengzhou (commissioned 2014), Changji-Guquan (2019, at 3,293 km and 12 GW capacity the world’s longest), and Hami-Chongqing (2025). Changji-Guquan alone has delivered 84 billion kWh of green electricity since commissioning, all consumed at the far end in Anhui.

At projected 2026 curtailment rates, Xinjiang’s renewable fleet will leave untapped the equivalent of more than eight times the annual electricity consumption of Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus supercomputer.

Building compute where the power is

China’s first attempt to build compute in the west was 东数西算 (”East Data, West Compute”), launched in 2022. The program designated 8 national compute hub nodes, including Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu, and Ningxia, and built real infrastructure: 633 hyperscale and large data centers delivering 268 exaflops of national computing power by 2024.

The program built real capacity, but utilization lagged. The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies found energy savings of 4 to 12% from moving data centers west, though western centers often lacked the fiber infrastructure to serve eastern clients in real time, and the companies, talent, and customers remained concentrated on the coast. Western data center utilization rates settled at 20-30%. Over 100 data center projects have been scrapped nationally in the last 18 months, and the government imposed a moratorium on new large-scale facilities in cities where existing centers operate below 50% utilization.

Compute-power coordination, the successor framework, takes a more focused approach. Rather than trying to solve those demand-side problems directly, it asks whether energy economics alone can pull enough latency-tolerant AI workloads west. It bypasses the moratorium by granting energy-rich provinces the same policy benefits as the original 8 hub nodes based on their power resources, not administrative designation. All new data centers in hub regions must source at least 80% of their electricity from renewables, a target western provinces already meet by default.

Xinjiang, which was not one of the original 8 nodes, was granted the same pilot status. It then launched what its authorities describe as China’s first multi-user 绿电直连 (”green electricity direct connection”) pricing, bypassing the traditional grid to connect power generation directly to the data center at 0.31 yuan per kWh (~$0.045/kWh). That is 0.04 to 0.07 yuan below the standard grid-delivered tariff and cheaper than Inner Mongolia’s 0.35 yuan per kWh (~$0.051/kWh), which Xinhua describes as one of the lowest among the national data center clusters.

Despite frequent claims that China has an energy cost advantage over the West, the Oxford study found that China’s industrial electricity prices are broadly comparable to those in the US. A data center in Guangdong or Jiangsu faces delivered costs of RMB 0.60-0.75 per kWh (~$0.08-0.14/kWh), near or above industrial rates in Virginia, the largest US data center market, because coastal Chinese provinces layer grid charges, capacity fees, and cross-subsidy surcharges on top of generation costs. Western green direct connection pricing at 0.31 yuan is roughly half the eastern rate, which is the real incentive for moving workloads west.

In April 2026, four central agencies led by the National Energy Administration jointly published a 29-item action plan targeting a “safe, green, economical energy guarantee system” by 2027 and “world-leading” clean energy supply for AI compute by 2030. The plan calls for million-kW-scale AI compute facilities with coordinated energy systems, multi-year green power contracts, and infrastructure REITs as a financing vehicle for compute facilities.

The NDRC is drafting a plan to spend 2 trillion yuan (~$295 billion) over 5 years on a nationwide AI data center grid, funded by sovereign debt and ultra-long special government bonds, with China Mobile and China Telecom as primary operators. The total could exceed 5 trillion yuan (~$740 billion) if power grid upgrades are included. Compute-power coordination is one of the frameworks that determines how energy-rich provinces participate in this nationwide buildout.

The demand wave

The infrastructure is being built to meet a compute demand curve that is still steepening. Deloitte estimates that global demand for AI compute is rising four to five times per year through 2030, driven primarily by inference rather than training. Inference workloads now account for roughly two-thirds of all AI compute, up from a third in 2023 and half in 2025. The market for inference-optimized chips alone is projected to exceed $50 billion in 2026. In China, computing-related electricity consumption rose from 82.4 billion kWh in 2019 to 196 billion kWh in 2025. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology projects it could reach 500 to 700 billion kWh by 2030, up to 5.3% of total national demand.

China’s domestic AI ecosystem is generating much of that demand. Chinese platforms processed 140 trillion tokens per day in Q1 2026, a more than 1,000-fold increase from 100 billion per day in early 2024. Chinese open-source models surged from 1.2% of global usage in late 2024 to nearly 30% by mid-2025, and by June 2026 accounted for roughly 48% of token usage on OpenRouter, overtaking US models, with DeepSeek, Qwen, and Zhipu’s GLM leading the expansion.

Goldman Sachs estimates that China’s top internet firms will invest over $70 billion in data center capital expenditure in 2026, and reports that Chinese data center power demand rose 25% in 2025.

The growing dominance of inference might seem to work against Xinjiang’s case, since inference typically runs close to the end user. But much of the fastest-growing inference demand is not real-time. User-facing inference (search, voice assistants) needs to run close to the user and will stay in eastern cities. Training is less latency-sensitive but faces its own constraint: as one executive told Caixin, the datasets are so large that “companies sometimes have to physically transport hard drives” rather than transmit them east to west. Planned network infrastructure investment aims to close that bandwidth gap. But once the data arrives, training runs are exactly the kind of sustained, power-hungry workload that suits cheap western electricity. The same is true of batch processing, agent workflows, and offline industrial analytics, and these workloads are growing fastest. In January 2026, eight ministries set a target of 1,000 industrial AI agents deployed across manufacturing, logistics, and public services by 2027. Some of these, like real-time robotics control, need to run locally. But many, like logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and document processing, are batch workloads that need cheap, reliable power and a network connection, not proximity to the end user. That is the market compute-power coordination is designed to serve.

The funding landscape

In April 2025, China launched a ¥60 billion (~$8.3 billion) state-backed AI fund to invest across the full AI industrial chain, with its first-year focus on semiconductors and computing infrastructure. ByteDance’s 2026 capital expenditure alone is ¥160 billion, over half of it on AI chips. Alibaba has committed ¥380 billion over three years to cloud and AI hardware infrastructure.

Below the hyperscalers, venture capital is filling the infrastructure stack. Some notable raises this year across the energy and cooling layers of AI compute:

Qingqi Power (清启动力): micro gas turbines for distributed data center power. Pre-A round, nearly ¥100 million (~$14 million), ¥500 million valuation. Facilities that cannot wait on the grid use on-site turbines to generate power where the connection has not yet arrived.

Xinhan Intelligence (芯寒智能): cooling systems for AI compute clusters. Pre-A round, hundreds of millions of yuan, ¥1.5 billion valuation. AI accelerators run hot and pack tightly, and at cluster scale the heat load outstrips what air cooling can handle. Cooling also sets PUE, the main lever on a facility’s operating cost.

Afalight (埃尔法光电): co-packaged optics. D round (sixth total), ~¥100 million, ¥1.2 billion valuation. Supplies a 2.4 Tbps optical engine to Alibaba’s AI data centers. As clusters scale, the copper links between racks and the network become the bottleneck on data movement, and co-packaged optics moves the transceiver onto the switch package to push interconnect bandwidth past that limit.

MetaPWR (沛塬电子): power modules for AI compute. Strategic round, undisclosed amount, ¥500 million valuation. AI racks pull very high current at low voltage, and the rack’s power conversion stage has to deliver that cleanly and reliably. Generic modules are not rated for the load profile.

Four cities, one value chain

Four cities are dividing the work: Karamay runs the most efficient facilities, Changji is building new capacity with major tech partners, Hami dispatches compute to Chongqing, and Urumqi connects westward to Central Asia.

1. Karamay (克拉玛依) has some of the most energy-efficient data center infrastructure in China. Carbon and Network Tech runs facilities with a PUE under 1.1 (PUE measures how much energy goes to compute vs. cooling and overhead; a perfect score is 1.0, and typical facilities run 1.3-1.5), with cooling and overhead energy one-fifth that of a conventional data center thanks to liquid cooling and Xinjiang’s cold, dry climate. The company has used 100% green power via green electricity certificates since 2024 and was listed on the 2025 National Green Compute Facilities roster. Karamay dispatches compute to Shanghai under a cross-regional framework.

2. Changji (昌吉) broke ground in May 2026 on a green direct-connect photovoltaic project paired with a China Unicom 16,000P intelligent compute infrastructure build at the Xinjiang Information Industry Park. Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu have all reached cooperation agreements, with scheduled completion in November 2026.

3. Hami (哈密) has been designated by the National Data Bureau as an implementation city for both the Xinjiang-to-Chongqing compute corridor and compute-power coordination. A dedicated all-optical network link delivers under 20 ms one-way latency to Chongqing across 4,000 km, with 20,000P of compute already operational and a target of 40,000P by year-end.

4. Urumqi (乌鲁木齐) is building a national-level internet backbone direct connection point alongside a BRICS digital industry cooperation network city node, positioning itself as a compute hub serving Central Asia and Europe. Xinjiang borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Mongolia, and has more than 20 cross-border international fiber cables connecting to those neighbors, recently upgraded to 1.2 terabits (China-Kazakhstan) and 800 gigabits (China-Pakistan). The provincial government describes its cross-border compute services as “算力出海” (”compute going overseas”). So far, the only confirmed services crossing these borders are satellite remote sensing and smart agriculture from Xinjiang’s Space-Air-Ground Integration Lab. The fiber infrastructure exists; commercial AI compute demand from Central Asian markets has yet to materialize. Eight intelligent compute center projects are under construction, and companies including Beijing Wanjie Data and Hefei-based Leinao have established operations. The Xinjiang Daily describes Leinao’s facility here as the first compute center using domestically produced chips. Leinao’s Bitahub platform aggregates self-built and external compute resources and reports a utilization rate above 90%, but that is a platform-level figure, the result of a marketplace that resells compute across multiple facilities. Facility-level utilization in western hubs remains at 20-30%. Whether a platform model can close that gap at scale beyond a single marketplace is untested.

Electricity to compute to tokens

Jin Qian, president of Carbon and Network Tech in Karamay, told the Xinjiang Daily: “Xinjiang is thinking about how to convert electricity into compute, compute into tokens, and serve the world via the internet.”

China does not need to export chips, models, or hardware to serve AI demand beyond its borders. It can deliver tokens over fiber, keeping the infrastructure, energy, and jobs domestic. Each step retains more value locally than the last: raw electricity captures generation revenue, compute adds infrastructure and operations, tokens add the service layer. Geopolitical and data-sovereignty constraints will shape which markets those tokens can realistically reach, but the economic logic of the conversion chain holds regardless.

The electricity-to-tokens framing has taken hold in other compute hubs too. Inner Mongolia’s Ulanqab, just over 200 km from Beijing with 4.2 ms fiber latency, has branded itself China’s “Token之都” (Token Capital) under a three-year action plan (2026-2028), with over 5 million standard server racks signed and 165,000P of running compute. But Ulanqab’s success leans on proximity to Beijing. Xinjiang’s pitch is different: the cheapest green power in the country, direct-connect pricing that undercuts even Inner Mongolia, and cross-border fiber to Central Asia that no eastern hub can match.

What has to go right

SMIC’s co-CEO Zhao Haijun warned on the company’s Q4 earnings call that rushed AI data center capacity could sit idle, describing the pace as “10 years of capacity crammed into two.”

Caixin, citing expert sources, describes compute-power coordination as being in an “early exploration period,” and draws a technical distinction between 电量 (”electricity volume”), the total energy available, and 电力 (”electrical power”), managing instantaneous demand. Xinjiang has plenty of 电量, but the real challenge is 电力. AI training clusters draw power in sharp, irregular spikes that solar and wind cannot match on demand. The green direct connection model that bypasses the grid also bypasses this buffer, so facilities need either substantial battery storage or a robust grid fallback. Some are already building this: a State Power Investment Corporation facility in Xinjiang operates entirely off-grid with on-site solar, wind, and battery storage, and CATL committed over $1.5 billion to data center energy infrastructure in two months, including $577 million into data center power supplier Zhongheng Electric in April and up to $942 million into data center operator VNET Group in May.

Data centers still account for only 1.68% of China’s total electricity consumption, projected to reach 3% by 2030, a narrower scope than CAICT’s broader “computing-related” estimate of up to 5.3%, which includes telecom and edge infrastructure. Compute-power coordination will not solve the curtailment problem in volume terms. The case rests on value density: a kilowatt-hour converted into AI tokens captures far more economic value than one exported as raw electricity, even if the total kilowatt-hours consumed remain a sliver of the surplus.

The timeline mismatch compounds the challenge: large computing centers can be built in 8 to 24 months, but traditional power substations require 3 to 5 years for planning, approval, and construction. Green direct connection lets data centers start operating before the substation arrives, but the grid fallback they will eventually need still takes 3 to 5 years to build.

The Xinjiang Daily itself acknowledges the challenges: “算力基础设施投资大、回报周期长” (”compute infrastructure investment is large, payback period is long”), along with the need for better cross-regional networks and talent.

Conclusion

The question this framework has to answer is the same one East Data, West Compute could not: whether workloads will actually move. Compute-power coordination addresses the cost side of that equation with 0.31 yuan/kWh green direct-connect pricing and equivalent hub-node status. What it does not address is the commercial gravity of the eastern seaboard, the dense concentration of developers, customers, and corporate headquarters that resisted the first wave of westward migration.

If the framework succeeds, it establishes a model with implications well beyond Xinjiang: that energy-rich, compute-poor regions can compete for AI workloads on electricity price rather than proximity, provided they target latency-tolerant workloads, whether training or batch inference, rather than real-time services. That would reframe western China’s renewable surplus as upstream infrastructure for a national or even global AI services layer. The energy still reaches demand, but as tokens over fiber rather than electrons over high-voltage lines, and the bottleneck shifts from the rigid capacity of a transmission corridor to the elasticity of a network. At the token layer, remoteness stops being the obstacle and becomes the advantage: stranded power converted into tokens, carried over fiber to markets the grid was never built to reach.

Where capital flows is where talent concentrates, where production capacity gets built, and where the next commercial technologies will come from.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

This week, a robotics company founded in 2015 with over ¥1 billion (~$139M) in annual revenue filed for its Hong Kong IPO at a ¥19.5 billion (~$2.7B) valuation. The same week, a robotics company founded 90 days ago with zero product raised at a ¥9 billion (~$1.25B) valuation. Both are rational bets. 127 deals spanned every sector, early-stage rounds continued to swell to growth-stage sizes, and the most interesting capital flows crossed sector boundaries.

Where the Money Went

127 deals this week, 49 of which disclosed amounts totaling approximately $1.75 billion (~¥12.6B). Strip out COOWA’s $600 million (~¥4.3B) IPO round and Tongwei Solar’s ¥5.06 billion (~$703M) restructuring, and 47 deals disclosed a combined ~$442 million. Most Chinese deals don’t disclose amounts, so the actual total is higher.

Stage distribution: 42 angel, seed, and pre-A rounds, 49 at Series A/A+, 15 at Series B or later, and 21 strategic investments. The early-stage dominance reflects a market where the embodied AI and physical AI boom is still generating new companies faster than it is graduating existing ones.

🧠 AI (25 deals)

The largest AI cluster spans physical AI infrastructure, video generation, and 3D content. Lightwheel AI (光轮智能) raised ¥1 billion (~$139M) for robot simulation data from a syndicate that includes three listed gaming companies. Sand AI raised over $100 million for video generation that competes with OpenAI’s Sora. Deemos (影眸科技) raised hundreds of millions of RMB for 3D generative AI with clients including Unity, Figma, and Canva. Jiangxing AI (江行智能) closed its third fundraise of 2026, backed by CATL-affiliated capital, Jinkosolar, and Yanzhou Energy as customer-investors.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (16 deals)

The headline is Tongwei Solar’s ¥5.06 billion (~$703M) restructuring, which dwarfs everything else. Beyond that, the energy transition stories are more interesting than the numbers suggest. HYDOtech (海德氢能) attracted a repeat investment from Saudi Aramco’s venture arm alongside Conch Group’s private equity arm, one of China’s largest cement producers. HYLICreate (合源锂创) landed a Xiaomi fund-led round for solid-state batteries with a live factory. Solide (索理德) raised for silicon-carbon anode materials at volume production scale.

🔬 Semiconductors (26 deals)

The second-largest sector by deal count spans optical interconnect chips, AI inference silicon, and specialized sensors. Aluksen Technology (傲科光电子) closed a B++ for high-speed optical chips that connect GPUs inside AI data centers. AIPhotonix (慧芯激光) raised to build its own manufacturing line for gallium arsenide and indium phosphide optical chips, targeting the same AI data center interconnect market. Transtreams (凌川科技) closed an A+ for a video compression chip that outperforms NVIDIA on compression efficiency benchmarks. Juxin Semiconductor (聚芯半导体) filed for a Hong Kong IPO as the world’s fourth-largest optical sensor company by revenue.

🤖 Robotics (20 deals)

COOWA (酷哇科技) is raising $600 million (~¥4.3B) ahead of a Hong Kong IPO at a ¥19.5 billion (~$2.7B) valuation, with SoftBank China Venture Capital backing. At the other extreme, Kunlun Xing (昆仑行机器人) raised an undisclosed amount at a ¥9 billion (~$1.25B) valuation 90 days after founding, with zero product. AGILINK (临界点) hit unicorn status at ¥10 billion in its B round, five months after founding, though unlike most instant unicorns it actually has revenue and 8,000+ dexterous robot hands shipped.

💡 Frontier Tech (4 deals)

The smallest sector by count but one deal carries outsized signal: Juhe Jubian (聚合聚变), a fusion energy startup in Hefei, raised an angel round co-led by Hillhouse Ventures and Sequoia China, the third fusion deal in three consecutive weeks across three distinct fusion approaches.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (8 deals)

Argo Space Technology (吉天星舟) raised a B round as a profitable space-tech component supplier with 55 payloads delivered and 30 in orbit at a 100% success rate. Jitai Aviation (吉太航空) raised for a modular electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, an air taxi that takes off like a helicopter but runs on electric motors, targeting China’s government-designated “low-altitude economy” covering commercial airspace below 1,000 meters.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (28 deals)

The largest sector by deal count spans industrial automation, optoelectronics, and specialized manufacturing. Highlights include Fubusi (辅布司), an AI textile cutting company, and Botler Robotics (博特勒), building high-temperature superconducting magnets for fusion reactors.

Spotlight

COOWA (酷哇科技)

Latest round, $600M (~¥4.3B), ¥19.5B (~$2.7B) valuation

Autonomous urban robots that actually make money.

COOWA builds autonomous robots for urban sanitation, delivery, and patrol, deployed across more than 50 cities. Founded in 2015 by He Tao, who taught at Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2012 to 2014, the company has spent 11 years building what might be the most unglamorous corner of robotics: street-sweeping machines, garbage-collecting vehicles, and delivery bots that navigate sidewalks and roads without human operators. The result is annual revenue exceeding ¥1 billion (~$139M) and the company’s first year of positive EBITDA, meaning the core operations generate more cash than they consume before financing costs and accounting write-downs. For a hardware robotics company, where depreciation on factories and fleets can mask operating health, that number is the one that shows whether the actual business works.

COOWA’s autonomous sanitation robots navigating a residential complex and public roads. Source: COOWA

The company plans to file for a Hong Kong IPO within the next two to three months, with Deutsche Bank as co-sponsor and Huatai Securities as lead. The listing would make COOWA one of the first Chinese robotics companies to go public on operational profit rather than a growth story.

Investors: SoftBank China Venture Capital (软银中国资本), Asia Investment Capital (亚投资本).

Announcement

Lightwheel AI (光轮智能)

Strategic round, ¥1B (~$139M), valuation exceeding ¥15B (~$2.1B)

The data factory underneath every robot company.

Lightwheel AI doesn’t build robots. It builds the synthetic environments where robots learn to move, grasp, and navigate before they encounter the real world. Think of it as the training gym for physical AI: companies like NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Figure AI, and 1X Technologies use Lightwheel’s simulation data and physics-accurate virtual worlds to train their machines. The company claims that over 80% of the simulation assets used by the world’s leading embodied AI teams come from its platform.

Three listed Chinese gaming companies, Giant Network (巨人网络), BOTON Technology (宝通科技), and 37 Interactive Entertainment (三七互娱), all ended up on the same cap table. The connection is infrastructure: the physics engines that power video games, the same technology that simulates gravity, collisions, and fluid dynamics in realistic game worlds, are the exact tools needed to create synthetic training data for robots. NVIDIA’s PhysX engine, originally built for gaming, now powers Isaac Sim, the company’s robotics simulation platform. Lightwheel sits downstream of that same stack with a proprietary physics solver. BOTON Technology is perhaps the most interesting investor of the three: it’s both a mobile game publisher and a manufacturer of industrial conveyor belts for mines and ports, and its stated investment rationale is that its mine shafts and factory floors provide real-world training environments that complement Lightwheel’s simulations.

The global benchmark is Applied Intuition, the US simulation company valued at $15 billion after a $600 million Series F in June 2025. Lightwheel’s ¥15 billion+ (~$2.1B+) valuation puts it at roughly one-seventh of that, despite operating in an adjacent market. Founded in Beijing in January 2023 by Xie Chen, a former simulation lead at NVIDIA, Cruise, and NIO, the company has raised approximately ¥2 billion (~$278M) across two rounds in the space of about a month.

Investors: Zhongguancun Science City Fund, Sichuan Development S&T Fund, Shandong Development S&T Fund, Giant Network (巨人网络), BOTON Technology (宝通科技), 37 Interactive Entertainment (三七互娱, follow-on), and others.

Announcement

HYDOtech (海德氢能)

B+, hundreds of millions of RMB, valuation undisclosed

Saudi Aramco invests twice in the same Chinese green hydrogen startup.

HYDOtech manufactures alkaline pressurized electrolyzers, the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity. Founded in Nanjing in late 2021 by a team from Academician Ouyang Mingao’s group at Tsinghua University, the company has delivered over 700 megawatts of electrolyzer capacity and operates projects across China, Europe, the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia. Aramco Ventures, the venture capital arm of the world’s largest oil company, first invested in HYDOtech in December 2024, marking its first hydrogen investment anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region. It came back for a second investment in this B+ round.

Conch Group, one of China’s largest cement producers and one of the country’s biggest industrial carbon emitters, also invested in this round through its private equity arm. Shell and TotalEnergies are project partners collaborating on green hydrogen production. The broader pattern — why oil companies, cement producers, and European energy majors are all converging on Chinese electrolyzer technology — is explored in The Bigger Picture below.

Investors: Aramco Ventures (repeat), Conch Private Equity (海螺私募, strategic), Dongfang Jiafu (东方嘉富, follow-on). Prior investors include Sinopec Capital (中国石化资本), NIO Capital (蔚来资本), Sequoia China, Xianghe Capital (襄禾资本).

Announcement

Sand AI

Two rounds totaling over $100M, valuation undisclosed

China’s bet against OpenAI’s Sora, with the Kuaishou founder investing in his own competitor.

Sand AI builds video generation models. Where OpenAI’s Sora and Kuaishou’s Kling (Kuaishou is China’s second-largest short-video platform) generate entire videos as a single computation, Sand AI’s approach generates video in 24-frame chunks, processing each chunk as a self-contained scene before threading them together in sequence, the way a filmmaker shoots scenes in order rather than computing the entire film at once. The company argues this produces more physically consistent motion, better cause-and-effect logic, and longer coherent video.

Sand AI’s MAGI-1 model demonstrating autoregressive video extension, generating physically consistent motion beyond the original clip. Source: Sand AI

The product, called VidMuse, launched in early 2026 and hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months, an unusually fast commercial ramp for a Chinese AI company. The interface is English-first, the product competes globally, and the company has released its core model (MAGI-1) as open source on GitHub, where it has accumulated over 3,700 stars. A next-generation model is planned for July 2026, using an architecture that routes different types of content (human motion, lighting, backgrounds) to specialized sub-networks trained for each task rather than running everything through one neural network. The approach costs less to run at scale and tends to produce sharper results.

Su Hua (宿华), the founder of Kuaishou, invested personally alongside Wang Huiwen’s family office. Kuaishou operates Kling, one of Sand AI’s direct competitors. A platform founder investing in a company that competes with his own product suggests he sees a future where the market is large enough for multiple approaches, or that Sand AI’s architecture might eventually complement rather than cannibalize Kuaishou’s own tools.

Investors: Su Hua (宿华, personal), Lollapalooza Capital (王慧文家族办公室), Jiukun Ventures (九坤创投), Matrix Partners China (经纬创投), IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Sinovation Ventures (创新工场), CAS Star (中科创星), and others.

Announcement

Deemos (影眸科技)

Strategic round, hundreds of millions of RMB, valuation undisclosed

A Shanghai startup selling 3D content tools to ByteDance, Unity, and Canva.

Deemos builds generative AI that creates three-dimensional objects, the kind of 3D models used in games, product visualization, film, and virtual worlds. Where image and video generation AI have attracted most of the attention, 3D generation has been a harder problem: objects need to look correct from every angle, with proper geometry, texture, and lighting. Deemos’s latest model, Gen-2.5, introduced test-time scaling, where the AI allocates more computing time to harder requests. Generating a simple cube gets a quick pass; generating a detailed human face with correct geometry from every angle gets five times the compute. The result is models with up to 10 million polygons, roughly the detail level of a professional 3D artist’s work.

About 80% of the company’s revenue comes from international customers, with Unity, Figma, and Canva among its global clients alongside domestic giants like ByteDance. That international revenue mix is notable for a Shanghai-based AI company, it suggests the product is competing on quality in global markets rather than relying on domestic demand. Subscribers and annual recurring revenue grew over 400% month-on-month following the Gen-2.5 launch.

Founded in 2020 at ShanghaiTech University’s MARS lab by Wu Di, who was 23 at the time, Deemos competes with VAST/Tripo AI in what is becoming a real-time category race for 3D generative AI. The company maintains offices in Singapore and Los Angeles alongside its Shanghai headquarters.

Investors: Cathay Capital (凯辉基金, co-lead), Shanghai State-Owned Capital Investment Pioneer Fund (上海国投先导, co-lead), ByteDance, Sequoia China, Meituan DragonBall Capital (美团龙珠), Lanchi Ventures (蓝驰创投).

Announcement

Transtreams (凌川科技)

A+, hundreds of millions of RMB, valuation undisclosed

A Kuaishou spinout chip that beats Intel and NVIDIA at video compression.

Transtreams builds a specialized chip called the SL200 that handles two tasks most data centers currently split across separate hardware: compressing video for streaming and running AI inference calculations. The company reports that the SL200 has placed first in multiple editions of the MSU Video Codecs Comparison, an independent benchmark run by Moscow State University’s Graphics and Media Lab that the streaming industry uses to compare how different chips compress video without degrading quality. The company claims a 30-35% compression efficiency improvement over NVIDIA’s latest encoder using AV1, the current industry-standard video compression format, meaning the same video quality at roughly a third less bandwidth and storage cost.

The company spun out of Kuaishou, one of China’s largest short-video platforms, in March 2024. CEO Liu Lingzhi was Kuaishou’s VP and head of its internal chip program, and was the first employee of Kuaishou’s computing center. The chip started with an immediate customer: Kuaishou’s own data centers, where it now covers 99.7% of live-stream transcoding. Total sales have reached approximately 100,000 chips, and Baidu Cloud is now a customer as well. Baidu Ventures also invested in this round, making it both a customer and a shareholder.

This is a chip story where the product shipped and scaled before the major fundraising rounds. In a semiconductor sector where most companies are pre-revenue and raising on roadmaps, Transtreams has 100,000 units in production, a benchmark record, and two of China’s largest internet companies as paying customers.

Investors: Qifu Capital (啟赋资本, lead), Xinguodu (新国都), Jinpu Investment (金浦投资), Zhaohui Capital (朝晖资本), Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Shuimu Investment Group (水木投资集团), Yizhuang Kechuang Fund (亦庄科创二期基金), and others.

Announcement

HYLICreate (合源锂创)

A round, hundreds of millions of RMB, valuation undisclosed

Xiaomi bets on a solid-state battery factory that’s already running.

Solid-state batteries, which replace the liquid electrolyte in conventional lithium-ion cells with a solid material, have been “five years away” for roughly a decade. The promise is higher energy density (more range per kilogram), faster charging, and reduced fire risk. The reality has been persistent manufacturing challenges that keep most companies at the pilot-line stage.

HYLICreate is trying to change that timeline. Founded in Suzhou in January 2023 by Dr. Liu Min, a former solid-state battery technology director at Dongfeng Automobile, the company built a factory in Huai’an, Jiangsu, that launched in early 2026. The company uses an oxide-based solid electrolyte, a ceramic material that is more stable and less likely to react with the battery electrodes than the sulfide-based alternatives favored by Toyota and Samsung, though harder to manufacture at scale. That stability-over-scalability tradeoff is why HYLICreate is targeting drones, low-altitude aircraft, robotics, and light electric vehicles rather than passenger cars: smaller batteries are more forgiving, and the energy density advantage matters most in applications where weight is a constraint.

The lead investor is Xiaomi Yangtze River Fund (小米长江基金), Xiaomi Group’s industrial investment arm. Xiaomi entered the EV market in 2024 and is building out a battery supply chain. Investing in solid-state battery manufacturing, even at the non-automotive end of the market, signals that Xiaomi is positioning for a technology transition that most of the auto industry has been pushing to “next decade.” The competitive landscape includes QingTao Energy, which has SAIC as a major backer and leads global solid-state battery commercialization, and WeLion New Energy, which filed for a ChiNext (Shenzhen growth board) IPO at a ¥18.5 billion valuation in late 2025.

Investors: Xiaomi Yangtze River Fund (小米长江基金, lead), Zhongbao Fund (中保基金), Chengdu Scientific Innovation Investment (成都科创投), Yangtze Green Water Fund (长江绿水基金), and one unnamed industry partner.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Kunlun Xing (昆仑行机器人) — Pre-A, undisclosed amount, ¥9B (~$1.25B) valuation. A 90-day-old robotics company valued at ¥9 billion with zero product. Founded by alumni of Alibaba Cloud and Li Auto, all eight investors re-committed across three rounds in 90 days. The market is pricing founder pedigree from tier-one tech companies at unicorn valuations before a prototype exists.

AGILINK (临界点) — Series B, ¥1B (~$139M), ¥10B (~$1.39B) valuation. Five months from founding to unicorn, but unlike most instant unicorns, AGILINK actually has revenue. Spun out of AgiBot, the company has shipped over 8,000 dexterous robot hands and reports profitability in Q1 2026.

Striding AI (正行创新) — Angel, near $100M, ¥1.95B (~$271M) valuation. Lead investors Charoen Pokphand (12,000+ retail stores) and Huaqin Technology, a contract manufacturer that builds smartphones for major brands under their labels, are also the company’s first deployment sites and training data sources. The founder’s third startup, after AI chips and rockets.

SENAD (赛那德) — Series C, ¥300M (~$42M), ¥2.6B (~$361M) valuation. Autonomous loading and unloading robots for logistics warehouses, deployed across tobacco, e-commerce, and industrial sites. Prior investors include Sinotrans and Alibaba. Investors include Yuanhe Houwang (元禾厚望) and Yuanhe Puhua (元禾璞华).

Jiangxing AI (江行智能) — C+D rounds, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥5B (~$694M) valuation. Eight-year-old physical AI company for energy and industrial applications. The company reports 1,500+ site deployments, a ¥5 billion (~$694M) order book, and profitability in 2025. Three fundraising events in 2026 alone. CATL-affiliated Chendao Capital, Jinkosolar, and Yanzhou Energy all invested as customer-shareholders.

Argo Space Technology (吉天星舟) — Series B, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation. Manufacturer of optical imaging and sensing systems installed on satellites, the hardware that actually observes the Earth or communicates through space. The company reports 55 payloads delivered, 30 currently in orbit, a 100% mission success rate, and breakeven in 2025.

Artivila (科辉智药) — Series A, nearly ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M (~$69M) valuation. AI drug discovery that went silent for four years between fundraising rounds, then returned with actual Phase I clinical data on ARD-885, a drug targeting inflammatory diseases. In a sector where most AI pharma companies have no molecules in human trials, Artivila returned from four years of silence with a drug in Phase I.

Juhe Jubian (聚合聚变, roughly “Convergent Fusion”) — Angel, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation. A fusion energy startup in Hefei co-led by Hillhouse Ventures and Sequoia China, an unusual pairing at the angel stage. Chinese fusion startups are splitting into three camps by chamber design: the tokamak (a donut-shaped magnetic chamber, the approach used by ITER, the 35-nation international fusion research project), laser fusion (firing lasers to implode a fuel pellet), and field-reversed configuration, a more compact cylindrical magnetic field. Juhe Jubian uses the third. Based in Hefei, where China’s EAST experimental fusion reactor is also located, the third Chinese fusion deal in three consecutive weeks.

Fuxi Quantum (伏曦量子) — Angel, undisclosed amount. CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, leading a quantum computing angel round. CATL’s investment portfolio now spans AI models (a reported ¥5 billion in DeepSeek), industrial AI (Jiangxing AI), and quantum computing, building positions well beyond its battery core.

Zhiyue Spatial Intelligence (知跃空间智能) — Angel 5+ round, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥3B (~$417M) valuation. A robot intelligence company betting on neuromorphic AI, computing systems that mimic the structure of biological neurons, processing information in sparse, event-driven bursts, firing calculations only when sensor data changes, rather than the constant matrix calculations that transformer models (the architecture behind ChatGPT and most modern AI) use. Neuromorphic chips consume a fraction of the power and react to sensor inputs in real time, which matters for robots that need to process continuously without draining their battery. A contrarian bet: the transformer has won almost every AI benchmark of the last five years, but its energy cost may be prohibitive for untethered robots.

The Bigger Picture

When Aramco Invests Twice: Green Hydrogen’s Quiet Cross-Bloc Alliance

Advanced semiconductors face export controls, entity lists, and deliberate supply-chain separation between the US, China, and their respective allies. AI models face similar pressures. Energy transition technology is moving in the opposite direction.

When Aramco Ventures invested in HYDOtech in December 2024, it was the Saudi oil giant’s first hydrogen investment anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region. Eighteen months later, it came back for a second round. In the same period, Sinopec Capital, the venture arm of China’s state oil company, deepened its own position. Conch Group, whose cement plants are among China’s largest industrial emitters, bought strategic equity. Shell and TotalEnergies signed project partnerships for green hydrogen production.

The logic is economic, not ideological. China holds approximately 65% of global installed electrolyzer capacity, and Chinese manufacturers produce systems at roughly $600 per kilowatt, a quarter of the cost of non-Chinese alternatives. Saudi Arabia needs the technology for its own economic diversification. Industrial emitters need it for decarbonization. There are no export controls on electrolyzers, no entity lists blocking hydrogen collaboration.

The capital flows extend well beyond one startup. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has invested $22 billion (~¥158B) in China, with clean energy as a priority. ACWA Power, the Saudi renewable energy developer, has long-term plans reaching $50 billion (~¥360B) in clean power assets by 2030, with a substantial share in Chinese solar, wind, and hydrogen. CYVN Holdings, an Abu Dhabi government vehicle, invested a combined $3.3 billion (~¥23.8B) in NIO across two tranches.

HYDOtech’s cap table reflects what these broader flows confirm: the countries with the most urgent need for energy transition technology are investing in China regardless of the broader geopolitical environment. Semiconductor supply chains face deliberate separation through export controls and entity lists. Green hydrogen supply chains are moving in the opposite direction.

The Gaming Engine Hedge: Why Three Game Studios Invested in a Robot Simulation Company

Three A-share listed companies whose businesses span mobile gaming, industrial conveyor belts, and military logistics all ended up on the cap table of the same physical AI data startup. Giant Network, BOTON Technology, and 37 Interactive Entertainment all hold positions in Lightwheel AI, the robot simulation company profiled above.

The infrastructure connection between gaming and robotics was covered in the Lightwheel Spotlight above. What the Bigger Picture adds is the investor behavior: none of the three publicly framed their investments as “transferring gaming physics expertise to robotics.” Giant Network described it as expanding its AI infrastructure portfolio. 37 Interactive positioned it as part of a broader AI strategy that includes investments in over 30 hard-tech companies, from Zhipu AI to Moonshot AI (月之暗面).

BOTON Technology’s investment rationale is the most revealing. Listed on Shenzhen’s ChiNext board (China’s growth enterprise market, similar to NASDAQ), the company’s original business is manufacturing rubber conveyor belts for mining, ports, and steel mills. It acquired a mobile gaming business in 2015. Its stated rationale for Lightwheel was that its mine shafts and factory floors provide real-world environments that complement Lightwheel’s virtual simulations, closing the gap between simulated and physical robot training.

37 Interactive first invested in Lightwheel’s A/A+ round in November 2025, months before the company reached unicorn status, and has followed on in every subsequent round. That early conviction, combined with its separate positions in multiple large language model companies, reads as a bet that physical AI infrastructure is the next computing platform.

Physical AI investment is pulling capital from unexpected sectors. Gaming companies, industrial manufacturers, and state-backed science funds are converging on the same infrastructure layer. The robots that will eventually clean factory floors, navigate warehouses, and drive delivery vehicles all need to train somewhere first, and the companies that control that training environment are attracting investors from every corner of the economy.

This week’s data makes one thing clear: the most revealing capital flows are the ones where the investor is also the customer. Aramco backed the electrolyzer company whose technology it needs for Saudi diversification. Baidu invested in the chip that runs its own video pipeline. Xiaomi funded the battery factory its vehicle division will eventually need. Three gaming companies invested in robot simulation because their physics engines share the same technological foundation. Customer-investors are becoming the norm, not the exception.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows is where talent concentrates, where production capacity gets built, and where the next commercial technologies will come from.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

This past week, DeepSeek raised over $7 billion (~¥51B) in its first-ever external funding round, the largest single financing event in Chinese AI history. The rest of the data is just as revealing: 93 deals in total, a wave of new company formations in physical AI, and at least six companies raising in the same week to build “world models,” AI systems that predict physical cause and effect so robots can plan actions before executing them.

Where the Money Went

Ninety-three deals landed between June 12 and 18. Nineteen disclosed amounts, combining for $8.7 billion (~¥62.6B) in total disclosed capital. DeepSeek alone accounts for 82% of that figure. Strip it out and 18 deals still disclosed a combined $1.6 billion (~¥11.5B), a strong week by any measure.

Roughly 43% of deals were angel or seed rounds, well above the typical weekly mix. This skew reflects a physical AI company-formation wave, with new teams spinning out of established labs and raising within weeks of incorporation.

🧠 AI (24 deals)

AI dominated both deal count and capital. DeepSeek’s ¥51 billion (~$7B+) A round accounted for the vast majority of that capital, but the sector had depth beyond it: LiblibAI raised $300 million (~¥2.2B) for its AI creative platform, SiliconFlow closed a ¥2 billion (~$278M) B round for inference infrastructure, and 卜拉格科技 raised ~$220 million (~¥1.6B) in its first institutional round with no shipped product. A cluster of companies raised to build “world models” for robotics. Physis, Manifold AI, and Synapx all closed world model rounds in the same window. More on this pattern in The Bigger Picture.

🤖 Robotics (13 deals)

Thirteen robotics deals disclosed $278 million (~¥2B). SEAHI Robotics pulled in ¥1 billion (~$139M) for its marine robots, while GigaAI closed a ¥1 billion (~$139M) B2 round for its humanoid platform. ACE Robotics, which builds AI software brains for robots, raised nearly $100 million (~¥720M) at angel stage with a ¥2.6 billion (~$361M) valuation. NOITOM Robotics, a leading player in the global professional motion capture market, raised several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M) for its pivot into robot training data. At the smaller end, a half-dozen angel-stage robotics companies each raised single-digit millions.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (8 deals)

Eight deals, $264 million (~¥1.9B) disclosed. Emposat (航天驭星) led with a ¥1.4 billion (~$195M) D+ round for satellite ground operations ahead of an IPO filing. ZEROG (零重力飞机工业), which makes both conventional electric fixed-wing aircraft (already shipping, over 1,000 letters of intent) and electric aircraft designed for vertical takeoff and landing (in development), closed a ¥500 million (~$70M) B round led by three Hefei government funds. Juneng Tianqing (聚能天擎) raised several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M) for methane rocket engines at angel stage.

💡 Frontier Tech (6 deals)

Six deals, $125 million (~¥900M) disclosed. Taiyi Quantum (太一量生) raised ¥300 million (~$42M) at Pre-A for its neutral-atom quantum computer, which uses ytterbium atoms suspended in a laser trap rather than the superconducting qubits favored by IBM and Google. The approach runs at room temperature and makes fewer calculation errors, the main bottleneck in current quantum systems. Xeonova (星能玄光) closed a ¥500 million (~$70M) A round for commercial nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers stars, would produce nearly unlimited clean energy if it can be sustained cheaply. Most approaches require enormous reactor chambers costing billions; Xeonova uses a compact alternative reactor design that reaches initial plasma ignition at far lower cost.

🔬 Semiconductors (6 deals)

Six semiconductor deals, mostly with undisclosed amounts. The most notable chip deal of the week was NanoCore Chip (微纳核芯), which raised ¥1 billion (~$139M) in a B+ round for its RISC-V processor platform. RISC-V is an open-source chip architecture, the open alternative to ARM’s proprietary designs, important because it avoids licensing dependencies on Western IP and gives Chinese manufacturers a path around US export controls on chip technology. The sector was quieter than in recent weeks.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (3 deals)

Three deals, all with undisclosed amounts. TCL’s venture arm backed an early-stage new materials company, and two strategic rounds landed in specialty chemicals and clean energy.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (33 deals)

Thirty-three deals across optoelectronics, industrial equipment, quantum instruments, display materials, and precision manufacturing. Most were early stage with undisclosed amounts. The Hefei government continued its aggressive cluster-building, leading or co-leading rounds in advanced materials and quantum instrument companies alongside its aerospace investments.

Spotlight

DeepSeek (深度求索)

A round, ¥51B (~$7B+), valuation ~¥400B (~$55.6B)

China’s top AI lab takes its first outside money, on its own terms.

DeepSeek is the Hangzhou-based AI research lab behind the open-source models that have reshaped global AI competition. Its R1 reasoning model hit #1 on the US App Store in January 2025, and its latest V4 model is one of the most capable AI systems publicly available: it can process roughly a million words of text in a single session, handle text, images, and audio together, and it does this at a scale (1.6 trillion parameters) that matches or exceeds the largest Western frontier models. For three years since its founding in 2023, DeepSeek was entirely self-funded by its parent High-Flyer Capital Management, a quantitative hedge fund. This A round is its first external capital.

The structure is as notable as the size. Founder Liang Wenfeng holds roughly 84% equity through a limited partnership vehicle that strips commercial investors of voting rights and board seats, with a five-year lockup preventing share sales. In most venture deals, large investors receive some governance rights in exchange for their capital; here they receive none. CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, invested approximately ¥5 billion (~$696M), pursuing a vertical integration thesis where its energy storage systems power AI data centers. The deal effectively prices DeepSeek as China’s most valuable private AI company while keeping founder control absolute. The only exception is the National AI Fund, which received direct equity with voting rights rather than the governance-free structure given to commercial investors. That distinction suggests the Chinese government negotiated for actual influence over the company’s direction, not just financial exposure, signaling that DeepSeek is now explicitly part of national AI strategy.

Investors include Liang Wenfeng, Tencent, CATL, and others.

Announcement

卜拉格科技 (Bulage, Shanghai)

First institutional round, ~$220M (~¥1.6B), valuation ~$2B (~¥13.5B)

The Qwen team leader leaves Alibaba and raises ~$220 million before building anything.

卜拉格科技 was incorporated in Shanghai in May 2026. The name sounds like a transliteration of “pragmatics” (语用学), a branch of linguistics that studies how context shapes meaning, how the same words mean different things depending on who says them, where, and why. The parent entity is registered as 语用科技 (”pragmatics technology”), a nod to the founder’s roots in language models. It was founded by Lin Junyang (林俊旸), born 1993, who at the time was Alibaba’s youngest engineer to reach its highest internal technical grade (P10, a tier typically held by only a handful of people across a 200,000-person organization) and headed the Qwen large language model team. He left Alibaba in March 2026 and announced his departure on X. Within weeks of incorporation, he raised approximately $220 million from Banyan Capital (高榕创投, $100M, co-lead), HongShan (红杉中国, $100M, co-lead), and Tencent ($20M), at a valuation of roughly $2 billion.

The company has no product, no website, and no employees beyond the founding team. The entire round was priced on founder pedigree. Lin’s focus is on what the field calls “world models”: AI systems that give robots the ability to predict what will happen before they act. Today’s robots largely respond to instructions step by step; a robot with a genuine world model can simulate a sequence of actions in its head and choose the one most likely to work, the way a chess player thinks several moves ahead. The team he built at Alibaba subsequently released Qwen-RobotWorld, a model trained on 8.6 million video-text pairs that ranked first on EWMBench, an independent benchmark measuring how well AI systems understand and predict physical environments, and Qwen-VLA (Vision-Language-Action), a model that takes what a robot sees and what a human tells it to do, and converts both into physical movements. Lin didn’t build those products (they shipped after his departure), but he assembled the team and set the research direction. When three investors commit $220 million to a company that exists only on paper, they’re betting the person who built the team can do it again.

Investors: Banyan Capital (高榕创投, co-lead), HongShan (红杉中国, co-lead), Tencent ($20M).

Announcement

LiblibAI (哩布哩布AI)

B+, $300M (~¥2.2B), valuation >$2B (~¥14.4B+)

One of China’s highest-revenue AI application companies keeps compounding.

LiblibAI is a Beijing-based AI creative content platform with three products: LiblibAI for image generation, LibTV for AI video (launched March 2026), and 星流 (”Star Flow”) for AI-powered design workflows. The company reports annual recurring revenue exceeding $300 million as of May 2026, with a projection of $600 million by year-end. LibTV generated over $1 million per day in its first month. The platform has over 30 million cumulative users.

Founder Chen Mian (陈冕), born 1992, previously led global commercialization for CapCut/Jianying at ByteDance, reaching management level 4-1 (the youngest to do so at ByteDance at the time). He left to build LiblibAI, and the revenue trajectory since has been the company’s primary pitch. The parent entity is Evoken (演语科技). This B+ round values the company at over $2 billion, making it one of China’s most valuable AI application companies. The valuation is grounded in real revenue rather than research potential, which makes it an outlier among this week’s mega-deals. For context, most of the other $1B+ raises this week are for pre-revenue companies. LiblibAI is not.

Investors: Granite Asia (lead), Tencent (lead), Shunwei Capital (顺为资本, lead), and others including HT Investment, Era Capital, Banyan Capital, Ant Group, Greenpan Capital, Mingjing Ventures, Sourceware Capital, and HongShan (follow-on).

Announcement

GigaAI (极佳视界)

B2, ~¥1B (~$139M), valuation >¥10B (~$1.39B+)

Rare among Chinese companies in that it has both shipping humanoid robots and a top-ranked world model.

GigaAI builds what it calls “Physical AGI” from its Beijing headquarters: a full stack spanning world models (GigaWorld), which handle physical prediction; perception-and-action models (GigaBrain), which translate visual input and verbal instructions into physical movements; and two hardware products (Maker H01, a wheeled humanoid robot for industrial use, and SeeLight S1, a household humanoid). Maker H01 began its first batch deliveries on January 31, 2026, and the company has partnerships with over 30 automakers and autonomous driving companies. A planned deployment of 1,000 robots with Longsheng Technology in Wuxi is underway over the next three years.

GigaAI raised ¥3.5 billion (~$487M) across three rounds (Pre-B, B1, B2) in just three months. GigaAI was founded by Huang Guan, a Tsinghua PhD in automation who previously worked at Horizon Robotics and Microsoft. Its GigaWorld-1 topped the WorldArena benchmark in April 2026. WorldArena is an independent evaluation framework run by Tsinghua’s FIB Lab that measures how well AI systems predict physical world changes, the closest the field has to an independent performance test rather than a company’s own promotional benchmark. GigaAI is rare in that it has both benchmark performance and shipping hardware, a combination that most competitors lack. The B2 investor base includes a Singapore-based fund (Lion City Capital, 狮城资本, a multi-round follow-on investor) and the China-Belgium Direct Equity Investment Fund (中比基金), a bilateral fund established by the Chinese and Belgian governments in 2004.

Investors: Lion City Capital (狮城资本), China-Belgium Fund (中比基金), China Construction Investment (建投投资), Wanxiang Qianchao (万向钱潮), Fosun Ruizheng (复星锐正), Huagai Chuangying (华盖创赢), Deyi Capital (德屹资本), Huacang Capital (华仓资本), Yuanshi Fund (元石基金), and others. Returning shareholders: Guozhong Capital (国中资本), Dachen Caizhi (达晨财智), Turing Asset Management (图灵资管). FA: Gengxin Capital (庚辛资本).

Announcement

SiliconFlow (硅基流动)

B round, ¥2B+ (~$278M+), valuation ~¥10B (~$1.39B)

The neutral inference rail where every investor is also a customer.

SiliconFlow is a Beijing-based AI inference infrastructure platform that serves as a neutral middleman between AI models and enterprise users. It hosts over 160 models from providers including DeepSeek, Qwen, OpenAI, and Google, without favoring any single model family. The platform has over 10 million users and 10,000 enterprise clients. Its daily usage, measured in tokens (the units of text that AI models process), ranked first among more than 70 providers on OpenRouter, an internationally-run marketplace that aggregates AI models from dozens of providers and tracks real usage volume. First place on a neutral leaderboard is a stronger signal of scale than a company-reported traffic claim, because the aggregator has no stake in inflating the numbers. Monthly overseas revenue has reached several million dollars.

CEO Yuan Jinhui holds a PhD from Tsinghua and was a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, where he later created the OneFlow deep learning framework, an open-source tool for training large AI models, before founding SiliconFlow in August 2023. The B round’s investor composition is the most interesting structural signal of the week: several of the investors, including Ctrip (the travel platform), JinkoSolar (solar panel manufacturer), Kingdee (enterprise software), NIO Capital (electric vehicles), Biren (GPU maker), and SenseTime (AI), are simultaneously enterprise customers of SiliconFlow’s inference services. When your investors are also your customers, the capital comes with built-in demand. It also means the investors have direct visibility into the company’s product performance, which makes the pricing more informed than a typical venture round.

Investors: Huakong Fund (华控基金), GGV Capital (纪源资本), Ctrip Strategic Investment, JinkoSolar, Kingdee, China Unicom Xinwo, Shengyi Capital (盛奕资本), Biren Strategic Investment, NIO Capital, SenseTime Strategic Investment, Giant Interactive, Guotai Junan Innovation, WaldenVentures, China Development Finance, Zhongguancun Science City, and others. FA: China Renaissance (华兴资本).

Announcement

SEAHI Robotics (世航智能)

A round, ¥1B+ (~$139M+), valuation ~¥5B (~$696M)

Marine robots for hull cleaning and underwater inspection, with orders exceeding ¥1 billion in six months.

SEAHI Robotics builds autonomous underwater and surface robots for ship hull cleaning, underwater security, and offshore wind farm inspection from its base in Suzhou. The company’s flagship product is the Orca (虎鲸) marine robot. Its AI system for marine operations, trained on data gathered from millions of hours of real commercial deployments (not simulations), handles the decision-making for the robots: identifying hull fouling, navigating around obstacles, and determining when a section is clean enough to stop scrubbing. In the first half of 2026 alone, SEAHI’s order backlog exceeded ¥1 billion (~$139M).

CEO Chen Xiaobo, born 1989, won China’s top national award for defense science and technology at 28, a credential that matters in a sector where contracts often require security clearances and government trust. SEAHI was selected by Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) as one of six partners for its In-Water Hull Inspection and Cleaning Innovation program, with trials beginning in H2 2026. Saudi Arabia’s HAKA Group has also visited the company to explore cooperation. Moore Threads (摩尔线程) and Kunlun Chip (昆仑芯), both domestic GPU makers, co-invested alongside Vertex Growth (a Temasek subsidiary). The companies building China’s AI compute chips are now investing in the robots that will run on them.

Investors: Moore Threads (摩尔线程), Kunlun Chip (昆仑芯), Shanghe Momentum Fund (上河动量), Vertex Growth (Temasek), CITIC Agriculture Fund (中信农业基金), Yuzun Capital (裕尊资本), Dayang Electric (大洋电机), and others. Returning shareholders: GSR Ventures (金沙江创投, 5th round), Vertex Ventures China (祥峰中国), Meridian Capital (华映资本), Changshi Capital (长石资本).

Announcement

Physis (逆矩阵科技)

Seed++, >$100M (~¥720M+), valuation ~¥3.25B (~$452M)

Two founders, ages 27 and 21, raise over $100 million in four months to build a universal model of the physical world.

Physis was founded on February 14, 2026, in Beijing by Ji Jiaming (纪嘉铭), 27, a PhD student at Peking University’s AI Research Institute who was selected as an Apple Scholar in AI/ML, an annual award Apple gives to roughly 20 PhD students globally whose research it considers among the most promising in machine learning. His co-founder is Chen Boyuan (陈博远), 21, an undergraduate at Peking University’s Yuanpei College who had already published a Spotlight paper at NeurIPS 2025, the field’s most competitive academic conference, where roughly 3% of submitted papers receive that recognition. In four months, they raised over $100 million across an angel round (from Hillhouse Capital and PKU-affiliated Yanyu Ventures/燕缘创投) and this seed++ round.

Their thesis: the “window for winning the world model race is compressing from three years to 18 months,” a quote from a 36kr profile. Physis debuted its first model, Physis-v0.1, at the Zhiyuan AI Conference on June 12, 2026, organized by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). The company has no commercial product and no revenue. The investors are betting on the founders and the timing: if the world model layer proves to be the critical missing piece for making robots useful, being early matters more than being profitable.

Investors: Matrix Partners China (经纬创投), 5Y Capital (五源资本), Guanghe Capital (光合创投), Ant Group (strategic), BAI Capital, Zhongding Capital (钟鼎资本). Returning from angel: Hillhouse Capital, Yanyu Ventures (燕缘创投). FA (angel round): Gaohu Capital (高鹄资本).

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Taiyi Quantum (太一量生). Pre-A, ¥300M (~$42M), valuation ¥1.8B (~$250M). Neutral-atom quantum computing (see Frontier Tech above). Team includes members from Microsoft, MIT, JILA, and NIST. Led by IDG Capital and Banyan Capital (高榕创投).

Xeonova (星能玄光). A round, ¥500M (~$70M), valuation ¥5B (~$696M). Compact nuclear fusion (see Frontier Tech above). Two working devices built in 26 months. Founded by Prof. Sun Xuan, a USTC professor with experience at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. Led by Jinpu Investment (金浦投资), Dachen Caizhi (达晨财智), and Cornerstone Capital (基石资本).

Emposat (航天驭星). D+, ¥1.4B (~$195M), valuation ¥10B (~$1.39B). Emposat runs the ground infrastructure that keeps satellites functional: the network of antenna stations that communicate with satellites, confirm their position, and send operational commands. Without this layer, a satellite launched into orbit cannot be steered, monitored, or tasked. Emposat operates over 60 such stations, serving more than 500 satellites. IPO guidance filed in June 2026. Investors include SAIC Group (上汽集团) and China Insurance Investment (中保投资).

ACE Robotics (大晓机器人). Angel, ~$100M (~¥720M), valuation ¥2.6B (~$362M). ACE builds the AI software layer that gives robots physical understanding, the ability to interpret their surroundings and plan movements without step-by-step human instruction. Rather than selling robots directly, ACE sells the “brain” that other hardware companies can integrate into their products. Co-founded by Wang Xiaogang, a SenseTime co-founder, and Tao Dacheng, an AI academician. Investors include Geely Capital (吉利资本) and Dachen Caizhi (达晨财智).

Manifold AI (流形空间). Pre-A extension, several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M). Builds interactive world models for physical AI, the same prediction-and-planning layer that the Bigger Picture section below explores. WorldScape-0.2 leads the WorldScore benchmark. Six rounds totaling close to ¥1 billion (~$139M) raised since the company was founded in May 2025. Backed by Temasek, China Guoxin (中国国新), and BAIC Industry Investment (北汽产投).

Synapx (章鱼动力). Pre-A, $50M (~¥360M), valuation ¥3.25B (~$452M). Synapx builds the data infrastructure and decision-making software that robot companies use to train and improve their machines, collecting movement data, labeling it, and turning it into training sets that make robots more capable over time. Founder Du Dalong was the sixth employee at Horizon Robotics, one of China’s leading autonomous driving chip companies. Three rounds totaling roughly $140 million in four months. Led by Jinqiu Fund (锦秋基金), Xinlian Capital (芯联资本), and HPR Capital (黄浦江资本).

MoleculeMind (分子之心). A round extension, past $100M cumulative, valuation ¥3.6B (~$501M). MoleculeMind uses AI to design proteins, the molecular structures that most drugs target. For decades, figuring out how a protein folds into its three-dimensional shape (which determines what it does and how drugs bind to it) required years of lab work. Deep learning cracked this problem, and Prof. Xu Jinbo, MoleculeMind’s founder, built one of the early methods for doing so in 2016. The company is a resident at Eli Lilly’s Lilly Gateway Labs Shanghai innovation hub. Per company materials, it claims over 90% target hit rate on protein design tasks. Investors include Lanqiao Capital (蓝桥资本), Pudong Venture Capital (浦东创投), and Fosun Chuangfu (复星创富).

Noematrix (穹彻智能). A+, several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M), valuation ¥4B (~$557M). Most robots today navigate visually, using cameras to see where things are, but they have no sense of how hard they are pressing or whether they are about to break something. Noematrix teaches robots to feel force and resistance during physical contact, the way a human hand knows the difference between picking up a glass and crushing it. Without this, robots cannot safely handle fragile objects or work alongside people. Co-founded by Prof. Lu Cewu, who conducted postdoctoral research in Fei-Fei Li’s group at Stanford, and Wang Shiquan, founder of Flexiv (a robotics company). Investors include Wuxi Data Group (无锡数据集团, lead), Yicun Capital (一村资本), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University AI Future Fund.

Simple AI (深朴智能). Pre-A, several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M), valuation ¥3B (~$417M). General-purpose service robots initially targeting hotel housekeeping, powered by a lightweight world model (Simple-World) that lets the robot predict what will happen when it interacts with objects in a room. CEO Li Xiaofei holds a Tsinghua PhD and co-founded autonomous driving company Idriverplus (智行者). Led by Didi (滴滴出行), the ride-hailing platform, which sees hotel robots as a step toward future autonomous fleet management. Investors: Didi (lead) and CCV (创世伙伴创投).

NOITOM Robotics (诺亦腾机器人). Pre-A++, several hundred million RMB (~$30-130M), valuation ¥3B (~$417M). NOITOM’s parent company supplies motion capture systems, the technology used to record human movement for film and video games, to a significant share of the professional market. That library of human movement data, accumulated over 13 years, is now being converted into robot training sets: teaching robots how humans walk, reach, grasp, and manipulate objects by showing them recordings of people doing the same things. Chief Scientist Han Lei, per company materials, previously led Tencent’s Robotics X Lab. The robotics division is now selling motion data and training pipelines to 30+ robot companies.

NanoCore Chip (微纳核芯). B+, ¥1B (~$139M), valuation ¥5B (~$696M). RISC-V AI chips for on-device processing in robots, vehicles, and factory machines (see Semiconductors above). Led by BlueRun Ventures (蓝驰创投), SMIC Juyuan (中芯聚源), and Cybernaut (赛伯乐投资).

ZEROG (零重力飞机工业). B round, ¥500M (~$70M), valuation ¥5B (~$696M). One of the few Chinese companies that makes both conventional electric fixed-wing aircraft, planes that take off from a runway using electric motors instead of jet fuel, with one model (RX1E-A) already shipping and over 1,000 letters of intent, and electric aircraft that take off and land vertically like a helicopter (eVTOL), aimed at urban air taxi markets and currently in development. Revenue from the conventional electric aircraft business funds eVTOL R&D, a self-financing model that most eVTOL competitors lack. Led by three Hefei government funds: Hefei Industry Investment (合肥产投), Hefei Innovation Investment (合肥创新投资), and Hefei High-Tech Investment (合肥高投).

The Bigger Picture

Angel Rounds at Unicorn Valuations

In 2023, Chinese embodied AI startups at the angel and seed stage typically carried valuations of ¥100 to 200 million (~$14-28M), and even at those levels many struggled to attract capital. By 2026, equivalent early-stage companies are commanding valuations of ¥1.5 billion to ¥13 billion (~$208M-$1.8B). This week’s data puts the shift into relief.

ACE Robotics raised nearly $100 million at angel stage with a ¥2.6 billion (~$362M) valuation. Maniformer, an embodied AI startup incorporated on February 3, raised hundreds of millions within 11 days of founding at a ¥2 billion (~$278M) valuation. Juneng Tianqing raised several hundred million RMB at angel stage with a ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. Physis raised over $100 million at seed++ with a ¥3.25 billion (~$452M) valuation. And 卜拉格科技 raised $220 million at roughly $2 billion (~¥13.5B) with zero product.

What’s driving it? China’s official financial press uses the phrase “关键窗口期” (critical window period) to describe 2026 for physical AI: the year when mass production verification and real-world deployment will sort winners from the field. The framing functions like a fire alarm for capital: it signals that the companies forming now will be the ones that survive consolidation, and that investors who wait for proof of concept will find the winners already locked up. Private investment rounds typically predict where public stock prices will move 6 to 18 months later. Investors who get into a company before it goes public, or before it becomes too expensive in private markets, capture the largest gains. That lag creates urgency: if you believe the public market will price robotics companies much higher in 18 months, the time to invest is now, not then. One VC told 36kr: “Maybe we are in a relatively crazy stage now.” TMT Post reported that investors now ask about valuation and previous backers before asking about the technology: companies outside the ¥10 billion (~$1.4B) valuation club reportedly “lack even the ticket to sit at the table.”

The first half of 2026 has already seen ¥46 billion (~$6.4B) across 288 financing events in embodied AI, with the top 20 companies capturing 70% of that capital. In 2025, CloudMinds (达闼机器人), which had accumulated over ¥5.4 billion (~$750M) in lifetime funding at a ¥20 billion+ (~$2.8B) valuation, ran out of capital, proving that massive funding at the pre-revenue stage does not guarantee survival. The pricing is not irrational on its own terms: investors are paying growth-stage valuations at the angel stage, betting these companies will be Series B businesses within 18 months. Whether those expectations survive contact with the market is the open question.

The World Model Gold Rush

The valuation surge above and the pattern below are the same bet: that the companies forming now will own the layer that makes robots useful.

This week, at least six Chinese companies raised specifically to build “world models” for physical AI: GigaAI (B2, ~¥1B), Manifold AI (Pre-A extension, several hundred million RMB), Physis (seed++, >$100M), 卜拉格科技 (first round, ~$220M), Synapx (Pre-A, $50M), and Aether AI (angel, $20M). Combined capital: roughly $500 million in a single week for the same narrow niche.

A world model is an AI system that predicts physical states rather than text or images. A video generator like Sora produces visually plausible content but cannot respond to an action in real time. A world model takes an input (a robot arm moves left) and predicts the resulting physical state (the cup slides off the table). The practical goal is to give a robot a mental model of what will happen before it acts, enabling planning and simulation without real-world trial and error.

Q1 2026 physical AI funding alone exceeded $6.4 billion, with China accounting for 43% of global robotics venture investment. WorldArena, run by Tsinghua University’s FIB Lab and hosted as a CVPR 2026 challenge (CVPR is the flagship computer vision research conference), evaluates how well world models predict physical changes. But WorldArena’s own research found that visual quality and functional utility have a correlation of only 0.36, meaning a model can generate realistic-looking physical simulations while being poor at actually guiding a robot.

In 2023, China’s “百模大战” (Hundred Model War) saw hundreds of large language models, the AI systems that power ChatGPT and DeepSeek, announced by Chinese companies, with six major startups each raising hundreds of millions. By 2025, the field had consolidated to a handful of survivors. World models may be entering the same phase: concentrated bets on a narrow layer, with the question of whether six companies (or sixteen) can maintain genuinely differentiated approaches, or whether open-source releases will collapse the field as DeepSeek did to LLMs.

Ninety-three deals, $8.7 billion in disclosed capital, and a generation of companies that didn’t exist six months ago now valued like mid-stage enterprises. The capital has picked its thesis: physical AI is the next platform, and the window to own it is closing. What remains to be seen is whether 2026’s bets age like DeepSeek’s early believers or like CloudMinds’ last backers.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows is where talent concentrates, where production capacity gets built, and where the next commercial technologies will come from.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

As this report went to press, China’s drug regulator accepted an IPO application from Neuracle (博睿康), the company behind the world’s first commercially approved invasive brain-computer interface. It filed for a ¥2.5 billion (~$347M) listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, the tech-focused board that serves a similar role to Nasdaq for Chinese companies. That timing is coincidental, but the signal is not. China’s frontier medical devices are moving from lab to market to public listing faster than most investors expected.

Where the Money Went

This week’s scan captured 109 deals across all sectors, with 27 additional stragglers from last week’s gap. Origin Quantum’s ¥3 billion (~$417M) quantum computing Pre-IPO dominated the headline numbers. Strip that out and 16 deals disclosed a combined ~$443M (~¥3.2B), a solid mid-tier week. Robotics and AI continued to lead deal volume, but the week’s most interesting stories came from frontier tech and advanced manufacturing.

🧠 AI (22 deals)

AI deal flow stayed strong at 22 rounds, though this week skewed toward application-layer companies rather than foundation models. The standout was CreativeFitting (井英科技), which closed both an A and A+ round backed by Ant Group for its overseas AI short drama app, Reel.AI. HiDream.ai (智象未来) received a strategic investment from Huace Film (华策影视), one of China’s largest private TV drama producers. A cluster of early-stage deals in spatial intelligence, AI education, and virtual humans filled out the sector.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (19 deals)

Materials and new energy logged 19 deals, almost entirely early-stage. MATTERENE (烯材科技), co-founded by Nobel laureate Andre Geim, raised a Pre-A+ from Aviation Industry Investment for its graphene film production facility in Shenyang. Advanced ceramics, specialty metals, and battery materials accounted for the bulk of deals, with state-backed funds leading most rounds.

🔬 Semiconductors (18 deals)

Semiconductor deal count held steady at 18. The week’s standout was Anatrix (安纳智芯), a six-month-old Peking University spinout whose RRAM analog computing chip earned a Nature Electronics paper and a Series A led by Matrix Partners China (经纬创投). Raysees (瑞识科技), the Samsung Galaxy Ring sensor supplier, took strategic capital from GAC at a ¥3.5 billion (~$486M) valuation. Wisewave (芯潮流), which designs the high-speed data link circuits that let chips inside servers and AI clusters talk to each other at hundreds of gigabits per second, raised a Series A from Sequoia China and CITIC Securities.

🤖 Robotics (16 deals)

Robotics logged 16 deals and produced some of the week’s biggest stories. Dexmal (原力灵机) closed a B round at ¥6 billion (~$833M) valuation backed by three of China’s top large language model companies: Zhipu AI, StepFun (阶跃星辰), and SenseTime. LiberAI hit a ¥3 billion (~$417M) valuation on a Pre-A. Inspire Robotics (因时机器人) raised a C+ at ¥2.6 billion (~$361M), having shipped over 10,000 dexterous hands in 2025. Qianjue Robotics (千诀科技) raised an A round at a ¥5 billion (~$694M) valuation for its robot decision-making and planning platform.

💡 Frontier Tech (9 deals)

Frontier tech produced the week’s largest round and its strongest stories. Origin Quantum (本源量子) raised ¥3 billion (~$417M) in a Pre-IPO with China North Industries Group (中国兵器集团), a defense conglomerate, among the lead investors. A nuclear energy cluster formed: Dongsheng Fusion (东昇聚变) raised $100 million (~¥720M) to build a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped reactor that confines superheated plasma with magnetic fields to fuse hydrogen isotopes into helium, releasing energy. Its D-He3 fuel choice produces near-zero radioactive waste. Weilan Zhidian (蔚蓝支点) raised hundreds of millions of RMB for a small modular fission reactor, and straggler Dongxi Fusion (东曦聚变) raised hundreds of millions for a fusion approach that uses high-powered lasers to compress fuel pellets until they ignite. In BCI, Shenfu Jianxing (神复健行) raised ¥300 million (~$42M) at ¥1.8 billion (~$250M), the largest angel round in Chinese BCI history.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (8 deals)

Eight aerospace deals, led by Expace (科工火箭), the commercial launch arm of state defense conglomerate CASIC, which raised ¥300 million (~$42M) in a C round. Tianmu Turbine (天目涡轮) raised a near-¥100 million (~$14M) angel for aviation engines, an unusually large angel for propulsion hardware.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (17 deals)

Seventeen deals in optics, 3D printing, precision equipment, and factory automation. The headline was Goertek Optical (歌尔科技), which took ¥1 billion (~$139M) in strategic capital from parent Goertek and Sunny Optical at a ¥8.79 billion (~$1.22B) valuation, positioning for the AR/VR optics cycle.

Spotlight

Shenfu Jianxing (神复健行)

Angel, ¥300M+ (~$42M), ¥1.8B valuation (~$250M)

Implantable brain-spinal interfaces that help paralyzed patients walk again.

Shenfu Jianxing is a one-year-old Fudan University spinout building implantable devices that bridge the motor cortex to the spinal cord. Unlike Neuralink’s approach, which reads brain signals and sends them to external devices, Shenfu Jianxing’s implant creates an internal neural bridge: it captures movement intentions from the brain and delivers targeted stimulation to the spine, bypassing the injury site entirely. Think of it as rewiring the body’s own communication channel rather than routing it through a computer.

Between January and March 2025, the company implanted devices in four patients with complete spinal cord injuries. All four regained voluntary leg movement within 24 hours. The first patient, paralyzed for two years, walked independently within two weeks. In December 2025, the company received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, the first Chinese brain-spinal interface company to secure this fast-track pathway. The clinical work was conducted with teams from Fudan’s affiliated Zhongshan and Huashan hospitals, two of China’s top medical centers. Lead researcher Jia Fumin is an associate researcher at Fudan’s Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence.

Per deal coverage, this is the largest angel round in Chinese BCI history, surpassing Gestala’s ¥150 million (~$21M) record set just three months earlier. The round was structured as a series of closings: Cathay Innovation (凯辉基金) led one tranche, while SDIC Pioneer (国投先导) and Sherpa Ventures (夏尔巴投资) co-led another. Hengxu Capital (恒旭资本) followed, and Fudan Science Innovation (复旦科创) added to its existing stake.

Announcement

Dexmal (原力灵机)

B Round, Undisclosed, ¥6B valuation (~$833M)

Embodied AI models plus a logistics robotics subsidiary with real revenue.

Dexmal was founded in early 2025 by Tang Wenbin, co-founder and CTO of Megvii (旷视), along with three other Megvii veterans, all graduates of Tsinghua University’s Yao Class, an elite computer science program named after Turing Award winner Andrew Yao. The company builds embodied AI models, including DM0, a 2.4-billion-parameter universal embodied model open-sourced on HuggingFace, an open repository for AI models, with hardware designs (DOS-W1) published on GitHub.

What makes Dexmal structurally different from other embodied AI startups is its merger with Atomix (原力聚合), a Megvii spinout that builds logistics robotics. Atomix generates approximately ¥1 billion (~$139M) in annual revenue from over 500 projects across more than 20 countries, with clients including Uniqlo, CATL, and Mixue (蜜雪冰城). Most embodied AI startups have models. Dexmal has models, deployed robots, and international revenue.

Four of China’s leading large language model companies have backed the company across its fundraising history: Zhipu AI, StepFun (阶跃星辰), and SenseTime invested in the B round, while Alibaba was the sole investor in the prior A+ round. Four competitors in the foundation model race, all concluding they cannot build physical AI alone and backing the same external infrastructure provider. Earlier rounds were led by Legend Capital (君联资本), Qiming Venture Partners (启明创投), and NIO Capital (蔚来资本).

Announcement

Vector Spiral (向量螺旋)

Strategic Investment, Undisclosed, ¥500M valuation (~$69M)

AI models trained specifically for garment manufacturing supply chains.

Vector Spiral has built what it describes as China’s only registered vertical large language model for the apparel industry. The company’s AI links fabric microscopy photos, design sketches, production specifications, and on-model photography into a single data chain that creates a shared language between raw material suppliers, fabric mills, garment factories, and brands. The practical result: a brand can upload a sketch, and the system generates 360-degree on-model product views that preserve fabric texture across every angle, a capability general-purpose image generators cannot reliably deliver.

The company entered Japan first, deliberately choosing a market where data quality is high and government AI subsidies made enterprise adoption easier. It now counts hundreds of Japanese enterprise clients and has entered the supply chain of Shenzhou International (申洲国际), one of the world’s largest vertically integrated knitwear manufacturers and supplier to Nike, Adidas, and Uniqlo. In a $3 trillion global garment industry that remains one of the least digitized, Vector Spiral is betting that AI can do more than generate pretty images. It can become the communication layer between every node in the supply chain. Qingdao Science Innovation Fund (青岛科创母基金) led this round.

Anatrix (安纳智芯)

Series A, Hundreds of Millions RMB, ¥800M valuation (~$111M)

Analog computing chips that sidestep the US chip embargo.

Most chips work by converting everything into ones and zeros and crunching through the math step by step. Anatrix takes a different approach: its chips store and process data at the same time, in the same place, by using tiny variations in electrical resistance to represent values directly. Think of it as the difference between reading a recipe one line at a time versus seeing the whole page at once. The result is much faster math on specific workloads, at a fraction of the power. The underlying technology is called RRAM (resistive random-access memory), a type of analog computing that has been a research topic for years but has struggled to reach the precision needed for real-world use.

In October 2025, the team published a paper in Nature Electronics showing their chip had reached a level of numerical precision (24-bit fixed-point, comparable to the 32-bit floating-point used in standard computing) that was previously considered impossible for analog chips. On a benchmark test involving the kind of parallel math that 5G base stations and AI training clusters rely on, the chip outperformed GPUs including Nvidia’s H100 by over 1,000x in throughput.

The chip runs on a 40nm process node, a mature manufacturing technology that requires no extreme ultraviolet lithography, the most advanced (and export-controlled) chipmaking equipment. That puts it well outside the scope of US restrictions on semiconductor equipment sales to China. The company was founded in approximately December 2025 by Sun Zhong, a researcher at Peking University’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, making it roughly six months old at the time of this raise. Matrix Partners China (经纬创投) led the round, with Frees Fund (峰瑞资本) and Alpha Commune (阿尔法公社) as co-investors. iFlytek Ventures (讯飞创投) reinvested from a prior seed round.

Announcement

MATTERENE (烯材科技)

Pre-A+, Undisclosed

A Nobel laureate’s graphene factory, now backed by aerospace capital.

MATTERENE was founded in 2017 by a team led by Andre Geim, co-discoverer of graphene and 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, and Cheng Huiming (成会明), a Chinese Academy of Sciences Academician and chief scientist at CAS’s Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology. The company makes graphene conductive powders, heat dissipation films, and graphene oxide for applications in batteries, electronics thermal management, and advanced coatings.

In August 2023, MATTERENE opened China’s first production facility for ultra-100-micron high-performance graphene films in Shenyang’s Hunnan Science and Technology City. At full capacity, the facility is projected to generate over ¥600 million (~$83M) in annual output. Graphene has been a laboratory material for two decades, with countless papers and few factories. MATTERENE is attempting to close that gap by turning a Nobel Prize discovery into industrial-scale production.

This round was led by Aviation Industry Investment (航空产业投资), a fund connected to China’s state aerospace sector. The aerospace interest signals that graphene’s thermal and conductive properties are finding applications in aircraft and satellite systems, not just consumer electronics. The prior Pre-A round in September 2023 was led by Guohua Investment (国华投资).

CreativeFitting (井英科技)

A + A+ Rounds, Tens of Millions USD Combined, ¥650M valuation (~$90M)

An AI short drama app built for overseas audiences, backed by Ant Group.

CreativeFitting builds Reel.AI, a mobile app that generates serialized short dramas using AI. The app is live on both iOS and Google Play, with distribution across Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The company was built explicitly for overseas markets from day one, targeting the short-form drama format that has exploded in popularity globally.

The founding team comes from TouchPal (触宝科技), a Chinese keyboard and input technology company that went public in the US. CEO Zhu Jiang previously served as TouchPal’s Chief Growth Officer. The company has raised six rounds since its 2021 seed from ZhenGe Fund (真格基金), with Baidu investing in a Pre-A+ round in July 2024. Ant Group backed both the A and A+ rounds closed in June 2026, alongside Lollapalooza Capital and individual investor Yin Yu (殷宇).

Can AI-generated serialized content sustain paying audiences, or is it a novelty? CreativeFitting’s fundraising velocity (six rounds in under five years, two in one month) suggests investors are betting the production economics work. AI-generated short dramas cost a fraction of human-produced equivalents while scaling to any language and any market simultaneously.

Origin Quantum (本源量子)

Pre-IPO, ¥3B (~$417M), ¥23B valuation (~$3.2B)

China’s largest quantum computing round, led by a defense conglomerate.

Origin Quantum was founded in 2017 by professors Guo Guoping (郭国平) and Guo Guangcan (郭光灿) at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei. The company’s fourth-generation quantum computer, Origin Wukong-180, features 180 computational qubits with error rates below 1% on two-qubit operations, a threshold that determines whether a quantum computer can run useful calculations or just demonstrate that it works. Its cloud platform has been accessed from over 160 countries, completing more than 900,000 quantum computing tasks. In late 2024, Origin became the first Chinese company to commercially export quantum computing power.

China North Industries Group (中国兵器集团, also known as NORINCO), a central state-owned defense conglomerate, led the round, contributing ¥500 million (~$69M) of the ¥3 billion raise. China Minmin Investment (华民投) was among the new investors, alongside provincial and municipal government platforms. The defense lead makes the dual-use classification explicit. The company began formal IPO preparation for the STAR Market in September 2025, with CITIC Securities Construction Investment (中信建投) as underwriter.

For context, Quantinuum began trading on Nasdaq on June 4, at a valuation of approximately $14 to $15.7 billion after raising $1.68 billion. Origin’s ¥23 billion (~$3.2B) post-money is roughly a fifth of Quantinuum’s market cap, but Origin is generating revenue from enterprise customers including Ping An Bank and China Southern Power Grid, and is further along the path to public listing in its home market.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Nuclear cluster:

Dongsheng Fusion (东昇聚变), Pre-A, $100M (~¥720M), ¥3.25B val (~$451M). Tokamak fusion using D-He3 fuel, a fuel choice that produces near-zero radioactive waste. Angel to $100M in six months, with nine investors including CMC Capital, Qiming Ventures, and Huajin Capital co-leading. Fudan Modern Physics team. Announcement

Weilan Zhidian (蔚蓝支点), Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥2B val (~$278M). Small modular nuclear reactor using pressurized water reactor technology, the most proven nuclear approach with over 70 years of operational history. Founded by Hu Po (胡珀), Tsinghua nuclear engineering. CDH Investments and Sequoia China in the round. Announcement

Dongxi Fusion (东曦聚变), Angel (straggler), hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B val (~$208M). Described in Chinese press as China’s first private company pursuing laser-driven fusion, which uses high-powered lasers to compress fuel pellets until they ignite. CAS Star (中科创星) led, having also led Dongsheng Fusion, deliberately hedging across fusion approaches.

Other notables:

LiberAI, Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥3B val (~$417M). Embodied AI models built by a young Tsinghua team. Demonstrated dexterous manipulation tasks (banana peeling, bottle caps, pan-frying) within four months of founding. Shunwei Capital (顺为, Lei Jun’s fund) led, with Cathay Innovation (凯辉基金) following.

Inspire Robotics (因时机器人), C+, undisclosed, ¥2.6B val (~$361M). Shipped over 10,000 dexterous robot hands in 2025, up from roughly 2,000 in 2024. Its components were on robots that performed at the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. More on the dexterous hand price collapse in The Bigger Picture below.

Phoskey (光子精密), Strategic, ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M val (~$69M). A 13-year-old sensor and automation company that has taken only two VC rounds in its entire history. Serves approximately 70 Fortune 500 clients across 70+ countries. CICC Capital (中金资本) co-led, a typical signal of IPO trajectory.

HiDream.ai (智象未来), Strategic investment from Huace Film (华策影视), ¥6B val (~$833M). Visual AI model company based in Hefei. In its April 2026 funding round (¥500M+ / ~$69M+), the company reported 30 million professional users globally and said Q1 2026 revenue exceeded full-year 2025, per company disclosures.

Grace Investment Machine, Angel, ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M val (~$69M). Financial AI reasoning engine built by a team including a co-founder with a PhD from Oxford and experience at DeepMind and Meta FAIR. SAIF Partners (赛富投资基金) led.

Goertek Optical (歌尔科技), Strategic, ¥1B (~$139M), ¥8.79B val (~$1.22B). Optoelectronic devices subsidiary of Goertek (歌尔股份), now taking strategic capital from both parent Goertek and Sunny Optical (舜宇光学) to position for the next AR/VR optics cycle.

Cliberd (微眸医疗), Series A, ~¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M val (~$69M). Ophthalmic surgical robot. Per the company, it completed the world’s first 5G remote robot-assisted injection into the back of the eye, performed across 4,200km (Guangzhou to Xinjiang). Multicenter randomized controlled trial completed; submission to China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) for device approval imminent.

Expace (科工火箭), C Round, ¥300M (~$42M), ¥1.5B val (~$208M). The commercial launch subsidiary of CASIC (中国航天科工), one of China’s two main state aerospace conglomerates. Changjiang Capital (长江资本) led.

Wisewave (芯潮流), Series A (straggler), hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B val (~$208M). Designs the high-speed data link circuits that connect chips inside servers and AI clusters. Sequoia China and CITIC Securities Capital (中信建投资本) co-led.

The Bigger Picture

Entertainment Companies Are Buying AI Model Equity, Not Licensing

A pattern is forming across this week’s deals and recent rounds that goes beyond the usual “AI partnership” press release. China’s entertainment companies are taking equity stakes in AI model companies, not just signing licensing agreements.

This week, Huace Film (华策影视, 300133.SZ), one of China’s largest private TV drama producers, made a strategic investment in HiDream.ai (智象未来) at a ¥6 billion (~$833M) valuation. Ant Group backed CreativeFitting (井英科技) across two rounds for Reel.AI, an AI-generated short drama app targeting overseas audiences. These follow a string of confirmed deals: Huace previously invested ¥100 million (~$14M) in Zhipu AI to jointly develop AI film tools. In January 2026, China Literature’s parent China Ruyi (中国儒意, 00136.HK) invested $14.2 million (~¥102M) in AISphere (爱诗科技), maker of PixVerse, which has over 100 million registered users globally. Hubei Changjiang Film Group (湖北长江电影集团) invested in HiDream.ai’s A round.

Licensing gives you access to today’s model. Equity gives you influence over tomorrow’s model, priority access to fine-tuning, and a seat at the table when training data and content rights get negotiated. For listed entertainment companies facing secular decline in traditional production, an AI model stake is both a hedge against disruption and an option on an entirely new production paradigm where content scales to any language at near-zero marginal cost.

China Medtech at a Fraction of Western Pricing, Now Seeking Western Approval

Two deals this week illustrate a pricing gap that investors in medical technology should pay attention to.

Shenfu Jianxing raised ¥300 million (~$42M) at a ¥1.8 billion (~$250M) valuation for a brain-spinal interface that has already made paralyzed patients walk and holds an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation. Neuralink’s most recent valuation was approximately $9 billion (~¥65B) from its June 2025 Series E. Shenfu Jianxing is valued at roughly one-thirty-sixth of Neuralink, despite having more advanced clinical results in motor function restoration.

On the same day, Neuracle (博睿康) had its STAR Market IPO application accepted, seeking to raise ¥2.5 billion (~$347M). Neuracle holds the world’s first NMPA registration for an invasive BCI medical device, a regulatory approval from China’s National Medical Products Administration, granted in March 2026. Its most recent private valuation was approximately ¥3.5 to 4 billion (~$500-556M), and it generated ¥108 million (~$15M) in revenue in 2025. Neuralink has not disclosed revenue and has no commercial regulatory approval in any market.

The discount extends beyond BCI. Cliberd (微眸医疗) raised approximately ¥100 million (~$14M) for an ophthalmic surgical robot. ForSight Robotics, an Israeli company building in the same surgical robot category, raised $125 million (~¥900M) in a Series B in June 2025, bringing total funding to $195 million (~¥1.4B). Chinese medical device companies are raising at a fraction of Western equivalents while pursuing the same regulatory pathways. As Chinese medical devices increasingly secure FDA clearance, and companies like Shenfu Jianxing obtain FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, this pricing gap may not persist.

The Robot Supply Chain Is Splitting Into Specialized Layers

This week’s robotics deals make visible a structural shift that has been forming for months: China’s embodied AI industry is not consolidating into vertically integrated companies. It is splitting into specialized layers, much like the PC industry did in the 1990s when IBM, Intel, and Microsoft each owned different parts of the stack.

The “brain” layer: Qianjue Robotics (千诀科技) raised an A round at a ¥5 billion (~$694M) valuation for a robot decision and planning model projected to be deployed on 100,000 devices by the end of 2026. The company’s architecture separates the “cerebrum” (high-level planning) from the “cerebellum” (motor execution), a framing that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has adopted as official policy language for the sector.

The “hands” layer: Inspire Robotics (因时机器人) shipped over 10,000 dexterous robot hands in 2025, up from roughly 2,000 the year before. BrainCo (强脑科技), originally a brain-computer interface company, launched its Revo 3 hand in April 2026 with 21 degrees of freedom and full-palm tactile sensing. Per Bloomberg, dozens of robotics firms including Unitree are now buying BrainCo’s hands. A dexterous hand from UK-based Shadow Robot has historically cost over ¥1 million (~$139K) per unit. Chinese manufacturers have collapsed that price by two orders of magnitude: LinkerBot (灵心巧手) now offers an entry model at ¥8,800 (~$1,200), and according to company claims, ships over 1,000 units per month.

The “platform” layer: Dexmal (see Spotlight) merged with logistics robotics subsidiary Atomix, gaining ¥1 billion (~$139M) in annual revenue across 20+ countries. Rather than building its own hands or planning models, it is positioning as the integration layer between them.

Betting on “the robotics winner” may be the wrong frame. The question is which layer captures the most value, and whether the brain companies, the component companies, or the platform companies end up with the pricing power.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows is where talent concentrates, where production capacity gets built, and where the next commercial technologies will come from.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

This was one of the busiest weeks of the year, with 132 deals in seven days. Two humanoid robot unicorns, a $200 million 3D AI round, and a wave of quantum deals backed by something closer to industrial policy than venture capital.

Where the Money Went

132 deals crossed the wire this week. About half published some indication of the amount raised, with 25 deals disclosing exact figures for a combined total of ~$1 billion (~¥7.5 billion). The real figure is substantially higher: most early-stage Chinese rounds never publish an amount, so treat that as a floor. The biggest individual checks went to humanoid robotics, but the broader story is breadth: every sector had at least eight active deals, and several had more than twenty.

🧠 AI (29 deals)

AI led the week by deal count, anchored by two outsized rounds. VAST (also known as Tripo AI) raised $200 million (~¥1.44B) for its 3D AI foundation model, while LightLink Tech (光联芯科) raised ¥500 million (~$69M) for optical chip-to-chip interconnect, a technology that replaces the copper wires between processors with laser light to keep up with AI compute demands. The rest of the sector split between AI agents, life science automation, and data infrastructure. Several deals went to companies building the training data that physical AI systems need: embodied intelligence is generating its own supply chain.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (17 deals)

Battery materials and energy storage continued their quiet grind. No single blockbuster, but steady capital into cathode and anode materials, lithium-ion cell makers, and advanced-materials plays. The largest disclosed amounts were modest: ¥140 million (~$19M) for a flexible photovoltaic company and ¥88.2 million (~$12M) for a lithium iron phosphate subsidiary. The sector’s capital arrives incrementally, round after round, without the headline figures that robotics and AI command.

🔬 Semiconductors (25 deals)

The second-busiest sector and the most strategically dense. A subsidiary of chip-design house Montage Technology (澜起科技) raised ¥500 million (~$69M) for switch chips that control how processors and memory share data inside an AI data center, the routing layer that determines whether thousands of chips work together efficiently or spend most of their time waiting on each other. Supercore (超摩科技) raised ¥305 million (~$42M) for processors built from smaller, stackable tiles rather than one large chip, a design that lets manufacturers match high-end performance using fabrication processes they have access to domestically. LEDA Tech (立芯软件) took ¥300 million (~$42M) for EDA tools, the software engineers use to design chips before fabrication. And at the other end of the spectrum, Sibai Chuang (偲百创) was acquired at a distressed valuation by listed RF chipmaker Wisecore for vertical integration. The stage distribution skewed early, with several angel and Pre-A rounds targeting advanced chip packaging, processors that compute directly inside memory chips, and display semiconductors.

🤖 Robotics (25 deals)

The biggest individual checks of the week. Spirit AI (千寻智能) raised ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) at a ¥18 billion (~$2.5B) valuation, its sixth round in twelve months. Astribot (星尘智能) closed a ¥1 billion (~$139M) Series B at ¥12 billion (~$1.67B). Below those flagships, capital concentrated in components and data rather than finished machines: dexterous hands, tactile sensors, force-torque sensors, tendon-drive mechanisms, and the training data that teaches robots to manipulate real objects all drew more rounds than complete humanoid systems.

💡 Frontier Tech (8 deals)

Eight deals, three of them quantum. HyQubit (华翊量子) raised its A+ from a 10-investor national syndicate for quantum computers that trap individual atoms with lasers to perform calculations. FieldQuantum (量坤科技), a five-month-old quantum-AI middleware company with no product, raised hundreds of millions at a ¥1.8 billion (~$250M) valuation. GGQuanta (国光量子) completed its third round in three months from industrial and strategic listed companies. The non-quantum deals included two brain-computer interface startups and a simulator for modeling nuclear fusion reactions.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (10 deals)

Satellite communications, eVTOL (electric vertical-takeoff aircraft, essentially flying taxis), and space. Interstellor (穿越者) raised ¥100 million (~$14M) for crewed spacecraft that fly to the edge of space and return without entering orbit, a market aimed at space tourism and high-altitude research. SparkSpace (星火空间) took a Pre-A for liquid rockets that use electric motors to feed propellant rather than traditional turbopumps, a simpler design suited to small satellite launches. The rest was early-stage: satellite-based Earth observation, rocket propellant tanks, and UAVs. Disclosed aerospace capital was modest, about $28 million (~¥200M), but the deals are concentrated in hardware categories that take years and billions to reach scale.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (18 deals)

The catch-all sector, and this week mostly components. Kunwei Technology (坤维科技) raised ¥100 million (~$14M) for six-axis force-torque sensors, the kind of touch-sensitive joint that lets a robot arm know exactly how hard it is pressing and adjust in real time. Servo systems, fiber-optic temperature sensors, and industrial automation filled out the list. Stage distribution was scattered: from angel rounds for polishing robots to a Series D for an optical sensing company.

Spotlight

Spirit AI (千寻智能)

A+, ¥1.5 billion (~$208M), ¥18 billion (~$2.5B) valuation

The humanoid robot company that beat global benchmarks and raised nearly ¥5 billion in three months.

Spirit AI builds humanoid robots and the AI models that control them, and this week it became the most visible symbol of where Chinese robotics capital is going. Founded in Hangzhou in January 2024, the company’s Moz1 humanoid runs on Spirit, a proprietary AI model that takes in what the robot sees and spoken commands, then directly outputs the physical movements needed to execute the task, seeing, understanding, and acting in one loop rather than three separate systems. In June 2026, Spirit v1.6 topped the RoboArena global benchmark, a public leaderboard where researchers submit robot control models for head-to-head comparison. It beat Nvidia-affiliated Cosmos3-Nano-Policy in second place and DreamZero in third. Earlier, in January, Spirit v1.5 beat Physical Intelligence’s Pi0.5 on RoboChallenge, a separate benchmark testing how well robot AI generalizes to unfamiliar tasks. The robot is not just a demo: it is deployed on CATL’s battery pack assembly lines with a reported success rate above 99%, and at JD.com retail operations.

The team behind the pace is unusually deep. CEO Han Fengtao (韩峰涛) co-founded and was CTO of Rokae (珞石机器人), one of China’s established collaborative robot makers. Chief Scientist Gao Yang (高阳) holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, where he trained under Pieter Abbeel, a pioneer in robot reinforcement learning at UC Berkeley who co-founded robot learning company Covariant. Combined, the ¥1.5 billion A+ brings Spirit AI’s total to nearly ¥5 billion (~$694M) raised in three months. That fundraising velocity, plus a rare co-investment from Yunfeng Capital (Jack Ma’s fund) and Shunwei Capital (Lei Jun’s fund), signals that Alibaba and Xiaomi ecosystem capital has converged on the same bet, treating physical AI as the next platform war.

Investors: Yunfeng Capital (云锋基金) and Shunwei Capital (顺为资本) co-invested. Gengxin Capital (庚辛资本) as financial adviser.

Announcement

VAST / Tripo AI

A+/A++, ~$200 million (~¥1.44B), valuation $1 billion+ (~¥7.2B+)

China’s best-funded 3D AI company, and it’s taking on a $5 billion American rival.

VAST builds AI models that generate three-dimensional objects from text descriptions or images, the 3D equivalent of what DALL-E and Midjourney do for pictures. Its Tripo platform has roughly 20 million users globally, the majority in the United States, with about 150 staff across Beijing and Hangzhou. Enterprise clients include NetEase, Sony, Tencent, ByteDance, and Microsoft. This round, combining A+ and A++ tranches, pushes total fundraising to roughly $250 million (~¥1.8B) and tips the company past the $1 billion valuation mark.

CEO Song Yachen (宋亚宸), born in 1997, studied theology at Johns Hopkins, then became founding employee number one at MiniMax, the Chinese AI lab behind the Hailuo video model. He left to start VAST at 26. The company’s research arm, Project Eden, is building a “world model,” AI that simulates entire 3D environments rather than generating objects one at a time, a direct challenge to World Labs, the $5 billion startup founded by Stanford AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, which raised $1 billion in February 2026. The market for AI-generated 3D content underpins everything from game development to architecture to virtual retail, and it is large enough, and the race urgent enough, that both the American and Chinese champions are being funded to the hilt at the same time.

Investors: Ince Capital (渶策资本, lead), China Life Private Equity (国寿股权), Alibaba, Baidu Ventures, Primavera Capital, and others. Yuanshi Capital (远识资本) as financial adviser.

Announcement

Aippy

Series A, tens of millions of USD, ~$250 million valuation

An AI game creation platform built in China for Western players.

Aippy lets users describe a game in natural language and plays it back as a working mini-game within seconds. Think of it as interactive TikTok, where every post is playable. The platform is a pure overseas product, built for the US and European markets, with a 4.8-star rating on the US App Store and a company-reported 3 million-plus downloads. Users have generated over 2 million games on the platform, and the company reports daily engagement of nearly 50% of monthly actives. The app operates under NADA AI, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Newborn Town (赤子城科技), which incubated the product before spinning it off for external funding.

Chinese companies have struggled to export consumer AI products to Western markets; most of the cross-border traffic flows the other direction. Aippy is a rare case of a Chinese-built, Chinese-funded consumer AI product competing natively in the US App Store, not as a China story exported but as a product Western users are adopting on its own merits. Founder Evan Yip (叶椿建), CTO of Newborn Town, has a track record building social apps for overseas audiences. If the retention numbers hold, it will serve as evidence that Chinese teams can build consumer AI products for overseas markets.

Investors: Glowill Capital (歌未资本, lead).

Announcement

LightLink Tech (光联芯科)

Series A, ~¥500 million (~$69M), ¥2.5 billion (~$347M) valuation

Optical chip-to-chip interconnect for AI clusters, and the most consensus-rich deal on the list.

LightLink Tech, incorporated in Beijing in February 2024, builds optical I/O chips: tiny photonic circuits that replace the electrical copper connections between processors with light. The problem they solve is concrete and growing. AI clusters are scaling to tens of thousands of chips working in concert, and the data flowing between those chips is outrunning what copper traces can carry. Electrical connections lose signal strength over distance and generate heat; photonic interconnects carry data farther, faster, and cooler. That is why the space has exploded globally. In March 2026, Silicon Valley’s Ayar Labs closed a $500 million Series E at a $3.75 billion valuation. In May, Marvell acquired competitor Celestial AI for $3.25 billion, with earnouts up to $5.5 billion. LightLink Tech’s A round represents the largest early-stage financing for optical I/O in China.

Gaorong Capital, Lenovo Ventures, and Cornerstone Ventures came in new; Sequoia China, Hillhouse, and Legend Capital followed on from prior rounds. The round closed within a single month. A round closing that fast, with that combination of top-tier VCs converging on a pre-commercial company, reflects strong consensus that optical I/O is critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI clusters. If China’s AI clusters are going to scale without dependency on Western photonic interconnect, this is one of the places where the domestic alternative is being funded.

Investors: Gaorong Capital (高榕创投, lead), Lenovo Ventures (联想创投), Cornerstone Ventures (基石资本), Sequoia China (红杉中国), Hillhouse (高瓴), Legend Capital (君联资本), and others. Duowei Capital (多维资本) as financial adviser.

Announcement

HyQubit (华翊量子)

A+, undisclosed amount, valuation reported at ¥3.6 billion (~$500M)

Ten investors, one quantum computer, and a signal that reads more like policy than venture capital.

HyQubit, spun out of Tsinghua University’s Quantum Information Center, builds quantum computers using trapped ions: individual charged atoms suspended in electromagnetic fields and manipulated with laser pulses to perform calculations. It is one of the three main hardware approaches to practical quantum computing, alongside superconducting circuits and photonic chips. HyQubit is among the most-funded ion-trap specialists in China. The company’s HYQ-B100 system, capable of stable operation at over 100 qubits, has been delivered to the China Mobile Research Institute, a confirmed commercial customer.

What makes this round unusual is the investor composition. Ten investors participated, led by Jianyin Investment (建投投资), a private equity arm of Central Huijin Investment, China’s state financial holding company. New investors include CRRC Capital (中车资本, the investment arm of China’s state rail company) and CITIC Construction Investment (中信建投资本). Follow-on investors include Baidu Ventures, Legend Capital, and the Beijing Information Industry Fund. The chief scientist is Duan Luming (段路明), a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician and director of Tsinghua’s Quantum Information Center, one of the leading figures in Chinese quantum research. The breadth of the syndicate, spanning state banks, rail, telecom, and defense-adjacent institutions, suggests that ion-trap quantum has moved from a research curiosity to a nationally coordinated investment priority.

Investors: Jianyin Investment (建投投资, lead), CRRC Capital (中车资本), CITIC Construction Investment (中信建投资本), Dunhong Asset (敦鸿资产), Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Legend Capital (君联资本), and others.

Announcement

Sibai Chuang (偲百创)

Strategic investment, ¥270 million (~$37M), ¥808 million (~$112M) implied valuation

An RF chip startup with real technology, negative net assets, and a listed buyer getting it at a discount.

Sibai Chuang, based in Suzhou, makes radio-frequency acoustic wave filters, the tiny components inside every phone and base station that separate one wireless signal from another so that calls, data, and GPS do not interfere with each other. The company builds several generations of these filters, from conventional surface-wave designs to newer, higher-frequency variants, and has developed a proprietary version it calls UltraLAW, which handles the millimeter-wave frequencies that 5G and future 6G networks require. The company says it is among the first to reach commercial production of this design. This week, Wisecore (唯捷创芯, 688153.SH), a Shanghai-listed RF front-end chipmaker, paid ¥270 million for a 33.4% stake, implying a valuation of roughly ¥808 million (~$112M). That is a markdown from the 2023 Pre-A.

The price tracks the financials. Per Wisecore’s public filing, Sibai Chuang had revenue of ¥7.44 million (~$1M) in 2025, a net loss of ¥56.77 million (~$7.9M), and negative net assets of ¥137 million (~$19M). Founder Gong Songbin (龚颂斌) is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an IEEE Senior Member. The technology is genuine; Lamb wave filters handle higher frequencies than conventional designs and matter for 5G and future 6G bands. But the balance sheet shows a company that has spent through its prior funding without reaching commercial scale. Wisecore’s rationale is vertical integration: combining its power amplifier chips with Sibai Chuang’s filters creates the kind of integrated front-end package that every smartphone needs and that Chinese phone makers currently buy from American suppliers like Qualcomm and Skyworks, one compact component containing amplifier, filter, and signal switch. This is a deal about supply chain autonomy, priced to reflect Sibai Chuang’s balance sheet rather than its technology.

Investors: Wisecore (唯捷创芯, 688153.SH, sole).

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Astribot (星尘智能). Series B, ¥1 billion (~$139M), ¥12 billion (~$1.67B) valuation. The company claims to be the first globally to mass-produce rope-driven humanoid robots, which replicate the mechanics of human tendons rather than using conventional gears. Thousands of units delivered in 2025, with the T1 model priced at ¥89,900 (~$12,500). State tech fund Guoke Investment (国科投资) and Ant Group on the cap table.

Botshare (擎天租). A+, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥7 billion (~$972M) valuation. A robot-as-a-service platform co-founded by Agibot (智元机器人), one of China’s better-funded humanoid robot makers, in December 2025. Over 4,000 robots deployed across 100+ Chinese cities, with a leasing network operating in 13 countries. Six rounds in six months. The bet is that the deployment model for humanoid robots is leasing, not selling.

GenRobot.AI (简智机器人). Pre-A, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. Not a robot maker but a data supplier: wearable systems that capture how humans move and handle objects, generating the real-world training data that robot AI needs to learn dexterous manipulation. Per company materials, over 10,000 hours of training data collected, with the majority of revenue from overseas customers. Ant Group and Didi co-led, with Shunwei continuing.

XYZ Embodied AI (星源智). A round, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥3 billion (~$417M) valuation. A software and compute platform that acts as the central intelligence layer for humanoid robots, coordinating perception, planning, and action. Incubated by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), China’s flagship state AI research institute. Per company materials, it supplies over 70% of China’s top embodied AI companies and operates as Nvidia’s largest distribution partner for Jetson Thor, the specialized AI computing module Nvidia designed for humanoid robots. ¥1 billion (~$139M) raised in ten months. CRRC Capital on the cap table.

LEDA Tech (立芯软件). Series C, ¥300 million+ (~$42M+), ¥1.8 billion (~$250M) valuation. EDA tools, the software used to design chips before they are fabricated. The round was led by the China Internet Investment Fund (CIIF), the investment arm of the Cyberspace Administration of China, with prior backing from Huawei’s Hubble fund, Social Security Fund sub-funds, and Shenzhen Capital Group. That the country’s cybersecurity regulator is the lead investor places chip-design software firmly in the national-security category.

Daimon Robotics (戴盟机器人). Series A, ~¥100 million (~$14M), ¥3 billion (~$417M) valuation. Vision-tactile sensing for dexterous robot hands: mm-thin sensors with 40,000 sensing units per square centimeter, roughly 170 times denser than human skin. China Mobile invested in December 2025, China Telecom in June 2026, and Inovance (汇川), the world’s largest industrial servo maker, led this round, an unusual convergence of telcos and the dominant servo company on a single tactile-sensing startup.

Xynova (曦诺未来). Series A, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥3.6 billion (~$500M) valuation. Dexterous hands for humanoid robots: the Flex 2 hand offers 23 degrees of freedom (independent points of movement, against roughly 27 in a human hand) with fine-grained fingertip force control, and the company manufactures its own 8mm brushless motors and ball screws rather than sourcing them. Li Auto led the round, with Xiaomi and CATL (via Puquan Capital) also on the cap table.

OriginFlow (渊澈太初). Pre-A, over ¥500 million (~$69M) across three rounds in five months, ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. The founder, Qin Shentao (秦慎涛), was 25 at close: a Tsinghua PhD student who built an embodied AI data company around capturing the electrical signals from human muscles as people perform tasks, a more detailed signal than video or motion capture alone because it records the intent and force behind a movement, not just its shape. A partnership with 58.com gives access to household scenarios no lab can replicate.

FieldQuantum (量坤科技). Angel, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.8 billion (~$250M) valuation. A quantum-AI middleware startup (building the software layer that would let AI systems tap quantum machines) that is five months old, has no shipped product, employs about 40 people, and just raised at a quarter-billion-dollar valuation. The thesis: quantum computers can generate the high-precision simulation data that classical machines cannot, repositioning quantum as AI training infrastructure. The valuation is almost entirely a thesis bet on a future capability.

NCC (微纳核芯). Series B+, undisclosed amount, ¥5 billion (~$694M) valuation. Compute-in-memory AI chips that perform calculations directly where data is stored, avoiding the energy-intensive shuttling between processor and memory that is one of AI’s largest power costs. SMIC’s venture arm (中芯聚源) is an investor, signaling a direct manufacturing relationship.

Xinhan Intelligent (芯寒智能). Pre-A, ~¥100 million (~$14M), ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. Two-phase liquid cooling for AI data centers: a coolant that boils as it absorbs heat from chips and vents that heat directly, without the large refrigeration units that conventional liquid cooling requires. As AI cluster power density climbs past what air cooling can handle, liquid cooling has gone from niche to mandatory.

Stragglers

Hydwin Robotics (海桓科技). Series C, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. Ship hull cleaning robots with a reported 45% domestic market share and international clients reportedly including Maersk and MSC Mediterranean Shipping, deployed across 12 or more countries. International maritime regulations requiring ships to remove marine growth from their hulls, which otherwise slows vessels and spreads invasive species, are creating mandatory demand for automated hull cleaning.

The Bigger Picture

China’s sovereign AI compute stack, assembling one deal at a time

Four deals this week map onto a single thesis. If China’s AI industry is going to scale without dependency on Western technology, it needs to build its own stack from design tools down to cooling systems.

Start with EDA. Electronic design automation software is the first step in making any chip, the tools engineers use to lay out a circuit before it goes to a fabrication plant. Three companies, Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens EDA (the division Siemens acquired from US-based Mentor Graphics), control over 80% of the global EDA market and over 90% of the Chinese market. China has fewer than 3,000 EDA professionals, a fraction of the headcount at any of the global EDA leaders. In May 2025, the US Bureau of Industry and Security imposed new restrictions on EDA exports to China; those were rescinded in July under a trade truce, but the structural vulnerability was exposed. This week, LEDA Tech raised ¥300 million (~$42M) for its backend EDA tools, led by CIIF, the investment arm of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s cybersecurity regulator. Its money reclassifies chip design software from a commercial product into a national security asset.

Move up the stack. Supercore (超摩科技) raised capital for chiplet-architecture CPUs, processors assembled from smaller, specialized tiles rather than carved from one slab of silicon, which allows manufacturers to use domestically available fabrication processes while approaching the performance of cutting-edge monolithic designs. LightLink Tech raised its Series A for optical chip-to-chip interconnect, the photonic plumbing that connects those chiplets at the speed AI training demands. Xinhan Intelligent raised its Pre-A for two-phase liquid cooling, solving the thermal problem that arrives once thousands of these chips are packed into a single room.

Together, these four deals cover design tools (LEDA Tech), chip architecture (Supercore), interconnect (LightLink Tech), and thermal management (Xinhan Intelligent). None of them is individually sufficient, and none is at commercial scale for the target applications. But the pattern of capital flowing into adjacent layers of the same stack, often from overlapping pools of state-affiliated and strategic investors, suggests something more deliberate than a collection of independent bets.

Quantum crosses into industrial policy

Four quantum deals in a single week: HyQubit (ion-trap, 10-investor national syndicate, ¥3.6 billion valuation), FieldQuantum (quantum-AI middleware, ¥1.8 billion valuation with no product), GGQuanta (国光量子), which uses light particles rather than trapped atoms to run quantum computations and completed three rounds in three months from industrial and strategic listed companies, and a straggler angel for Suidao Zhiyuan (隧穿智元), which is working on quantum computers capable of correcting their own calculation errors in real time. Across all four deals, the investor profiles matter more than the technical distinctions.

The numbers behind the trend are striking. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Chinese quantum companies raised roughly ¥2.2 billion (~$305M) across 17 deals, nearly matching the full-year total for 2025. Quantum was named among the priority “future industries” in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, announced in March 2026. Regional governments have allocated an estimated ¥121.8 billion (~$16.9B) through national venture guidance funds covering key tech corridors including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Greater Bay Area, with quantum among the target sectors.

On the applications side, quantum hardware is increasingly funded by the industries that intend to use it. This week’s GGQuanta round was led by Weide Information (688171.SH), a listed industrial control security company; its prior round was led by another strategic investor. HyQubit’s delivered system sits at China Mobile’s research institute. The checks are coming from prospective customers and state-adjacent strategics, not generalist VCs.

Corporates are replacing VCs as lead investors

Spirit AI was backed by Jack Ma’s Yunfeng and Lei Jun’s Shunwei, ecosystem funds attached to Alibaba and Xiaomi. Sibai Chuang was bought by a listed chip company for vertical integration. Daimon Robotics was led by Inovance, the servo giant, after consecutive investments from China Mobile and China Telecom. Xynova stacked Li Auto, Xiaomi, and CATL on its cap table. HyQubit’s 10-investor syndicate includes state rail, state telecom, state banks, and social security funds.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) had backed 72.5% of China’s unicorn companies by 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, CVC accounted for 46% of all VC deal frequency, with corporate LP funding amounts up 36% year over year. The state and corporate share of limited-partner capital in RMB-denominated funds reached 41% by 2023, up from 20% in 2014, and the trend has only accelerated since. By 2024, an estimated 8,000 industrial groups were active as direct investors, with CVC comprising 37% of all primary market transactions.

What this means for the companies raising: the investor is increasingly also the customer, the distributor, or the regulator. Inovance invests in Daimon because it needs the sensors for its own humanoid robot production, and the same logic applies to every corporate check on this list. China Mobile and China Telecom are buying a window into the hardware that will populate their 5G-enabled smart factories. When the check-writer is also the buyer, it changes the terms. The startup gets a guaranteed channel, but also a tighter leash. For China’s tech ecosystem, the result resembles the old Japanese keiretsu model, where car makers funded their parts suppliers and electronics giants funded their component makers, binding supplier and customer into one financial web.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

It was here that CATL had built a lab to burn, freeze, overload and electrocute batteries, then document exactly how they die.

A Surge in Demand

The world adds more than a Japan’s worth of electricity demand every year. Global use is rising by about 1,100 TWh annually, up from ~700 a year over the previous decade, the fastest sustained growth in more than 10 years. The cause is the electrification of almost everything: industry, air conditioning, electric vehicles and computing.

One of the fastest-growing drivers is the AI data center.

A decade ago, a large data center drew about 50 MW. Today a single AI campus is designed for 10-20x that, and the biggest are planned for 1 GW or more, the output of a nuclear reactor, on one site. A single rack of Nvidia’s latest AI chips draws up to 140 kW, against 10-15 kW for a rack of conventional servers. A 500 MW facility running flat out uses about as much electricity in a year as 360,000 American homes, roughly the number of households in San Francisco.

OpenRouter, a marketplace that routes requests across most of the major AI models, now processes more than a quadrillion tokens a year, the units of text and data a model reads and generates, roughly 15x the volume of a year earlier. Goldman Sachs expects token consumption to rise another 24x by 2030.

The obvious counterargument is efficiency: each new generation of chips and models does more per watt. But usage is growing far faster than efficiency, so total power demand climbs rather than falls. The International Energy Agency expects data centers worldwide to roughly double their electricity use by 2030, to about 945 TWh, growing four times faster than demand from everything else.

Even so, data centers at that scale would still account for less than 3% of the world’s electricity. The total energy is not the problem. The problem is concentration: hundreds of megawatts of demand arriving at a single point on the grid, with load profiles that swing by the second, faster than any grid was designed for.

That power still has to reach the chips.

Power Struggle

Between the data center and the power it needs sit three problems, each distinct, each getting worse.

1. Power delivery is years behind demand. In the United States alone, more than 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity sits in the interconnection queue, waiting for approval to connect to the grid. The median wait to commercial operation is about five years. Google has reported potential delays of up to 12 years. Building a data center takes 12 to 24 months. Connecting it to the grid can take three times longer. In Ireland, EirGrid restricted new data-center connections in Dublin because the transmission network could not absorb them. The queue is not just long: more than 90% of interconnection applications arrive with technical deficiencies needing multiple rounds of revision before a grid operator will even begin a study.

2. The demand itself is a new kind of problem. A conventional data center drew steady, predictable power. An AI training facility does not. Training runs ramp consumption up and down by megawatts in seconds as jobs start, checkpoint, and restart. Gas turbines, the primary source of flexible generation, take minutes to ramp. The grid was engineered for loads that change slowly and predictably. The load profile of an AI data center is unlike anything it was built to serve. It is also more expensive to run: electricity pricing penalizes peaks, and a facility whose consumption swings unpredictably pays for the spikes, not the average.

3. The cost of the mismatch does not stay inside the facility. US electricity prices rose about 13% in 2025. In Georgia, residential bills climbed roughly sixfold in two years to about $175 a month while Georgia Power proposed $15 billion in expansion driven largely by data-center demand. More than 20 data-center projects across the country have been delayed or canceled amid local opposition. In March 2026, AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI signed the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge, committing to cover generation and grid-upgrade costs rather than pass them to households.

Batteries Lead the Charge

Batteries do not generate electricity. They store it, release it, and do both faster than any other asset on the grid. That combination solves several of the problems above at once.

1. Time-to-power. A battery system can be installed in months. Paired with on-site generation, it lets a facility begin operating while the grid connection is still years away. It also raises effective capacity beyond what the connection alone can deliver: if the grid provides 50 MW but the facility needs 200 MW at peak, the battery charges when load is light and discharges when it exceeds the connection’s limit. At the extreme, a facility goes fully off-grid with solar and batteries, bypassing the queue entirely.

2. Shock absorption. When a training run spikes or drops demand by tens of megawatts in seconds, batteries match it instantly. Turbines take minutes. The rest of the power system sees a smoother load instead of raw spikes. That smoothing saves money: batteries store cheap off-peak energy and discharge during spikes, reducing peak charges.

3. Grid services. A facility with co-located storage can provide frequency regulation and voltage support back to the grid, turning it from a burden into a resource.

4. Protecting the compute. A power cut mid-training means a lost checkpoint, potentially days of wasted work. Batteries bridge outages in milliseconds, far faster than a turbine can start, and deliver cleaner power through solid-state inverters than rotating generators produce. For racks of GPUs sensitive to voltage fluctuations, that matters.

Batteries have a hard constraint. They store hours of energy, not days. They cannot sustain a facility through a prolonged outage or replace the grid as a primary power source. Gas, grid, and eventually nuclear provide that sustained generation. But batteries are the fast-responding layer that makes the rest of the stack viable.

The Trust Problem

If batteries can do all of this, the obvious question is why the storage market is not larger. The answer is not technology, cost, or capacity.

Storage batteries and EV batteries began developing in parallel around 2009. Today the storage market is only about a fifth the size of the power-battery business. The bottleneck is proving they work. Vendors claim cycle lives and efficiencies that nobody can independently verify. Some equipment underperforms in the field. Buyers cannot tell good from bad, so they price everything as if it might be bad.

That shows up directly in what people will pay. Tesla’s Megapack sells at several times the per-Wh price of comparable Chinese storage products overseas. Tesla has five years of deployed operating data, a track record asset managers can underwrite. Chinese manufacturers, many of them technically competitive, do not. Someone has to close that trust gap.

Back to the Lab

That burned-out shipping container in Xiamen was not a failure. It was a test. The hall I walked through is one of five laboratories in what CATL and the Xiamen municipal government have jointly built as the world’s largest energy storage validation platform: the Empirical Energy Storage Technology Research Institute (实证储能科技研究院). Ten hectares, roughly RMB 3 billion, and built from the start as industry-shared infrastructure (行业共享的基础设施), open to any manufacturer willing to put its equipment through the process.

Chen Xiaobo (陈小波), the institute’s dean, describes it as a physical exam center plus hospital (体检中心加医院): install a prototype, run the full test suite, identify failures, fix them on site, iterate. Another expert called it a wind tunnel (风洞).

The five labs test a storage system the way the real world would break it:

Grid connection. A 35kV/100MVA grid simulator that tests more than 10 large containers simultaneously, simulating a 1,000-node grid topology across 15 to 60 Hz to cover domestic and international standards. A system destined for Fujian’s grid gets tested against Fujian’s actual grid behavior. The lab serves a joint State Grid (国网) / China Southern Power Grid (南网) storage innovation consortium.

High-voltage safety. Testing from 1kV to 500kV, tracing the root mechanisms of ignition and explosion under extreme voltage. The engineering goal: equipment that does not catch fire and does not explode (不起火、不爆炸).

Thermal safety and combustion. The hall from the opening scene. A 20MW calorimeter, the first of its kind, inside 100,000 cubic meters of indoor burn space. Nine large storage containers can be deflagration-tested simultaneously. This is where batteries are documented failing under thermal stress.

Environmental adaptability. Five chambers (climate, salt spray, rain, dust, environment) covering minus 50°C to 100°C, altitudes up to 7,200 meters, and full-grade dust and water protection. A container bound for the Gobi Desert or a Norwegian coast gets tested under the conditions it will actually face.

Electromagnetic compatibility. The only EMC lab in the world that can take a full 40-foot shipping container as a single unit. A 65-ton turntable, 5MW power supply, and an anechoic chamber running real high-power charge/discharge cycles. EMC testing at the scale the equipment actually ships at, not on a downsized sample.

Chen names three beneficiaries:

1. Equipment makers. Faster iteration, fewer field failures, deeper knowledge of their own products.

2. Long-term asset investors. Returns depend on uptime (带电率) and how quickly a station moves from grid connection to revenue. Validation shortens that timeline. “Real money they can actually earn” (实实在在可以赚到的钱).

3. The grid. Confidence that when a major event hits and storage needs to hold the grid up, it can.

The institute is already in talks with a European insurer about recognizing validation data. A second expert predicted a national grading body will eventually rate storage equipment on safety, reliability, and grid functionality. The chain: validated asset, rated asset, insurable asset, financeable asset class. Solar walked this path over the past decade. Storage is at the stage solar was before institutional capital flooded in.

CATL’s strategy: make the lab open, but the investment unrepeatable. The consortium model follows GB 38031, the power-battery safety standard that became a national standard through industry collaboration. Chen insists the intent is “not to block others” (不卡别人). Another expert: “it will be hard for anyone to invest in a facility this complete again.” Both are true. To reinforce the platform’s independence, CATL brought in TÜV Süd, TÜV Rheinland, CSA, and CGC (鉴衡) as co-supervisors. Storage is ~20% of CATL’s business. The lab’s value is raising the bar for the entire industry.

The Money Is Moving

Capital is already flowing. Nextpower acquired Prevalon Energy for up to $365 million in May 2026, buying into BESS and AI data-center infrastructure. Prevalon, spun out of Mitsubishi Power in 2024, has over 6 GWh deployed globally with firm contracts supporting hyperscaler data centers.

In Oregon, Aligned Data Centers and Calibrant Energy deployed a 31 MW/62 MWh battery system at a Pacific Northwest campus, the first US project where a battery was purpose-built to accelerate interconnection and bring a data center online years earlier. Operational in 2026.

LG Energy Solution signed a $1.6 billion deal with Michigan utility DTE Energy for 1.5 GW/6 GWh of battery storage across eight projects, using LFP cells manufactured in the US and Canada. LG shares surged 15% on the announcement.

In Croatia, the Pantheon AI project backed by KKR-owned Greenvolt is building a €50 billion hyperscale data-center campus with 500 MW of solar and 8 GWh of battery storage behind the meter, designed to operate fully off-grid to bypass interconnection constraints. It is the largest private US investment in Europe.

Google acquired Intersect Power for $4.75 billion, gaining 2.2 GW of operating solar and 2.4 GWh of battery storage co-located with data centers, targeting $20 billion in renewable infrastructure by the end of the decade. In Minnesota, Google partnered with Xcel Energy to deploy a 300 MW/30 GWh iron-air battery from Form Energy, the world’s largest battery by energy capacity, capable of discharging for 100 hours. Iron-air stores energy by rusting iron and releases it by reversing the reaction, a technology that directly addresses the “hours not days” constraint of lithium-ion.

Jefferies estimates that hyperscalers represent a ~20 GW BESS opportunity through 2035, with ~9 GW through 2030. BloombergNEF raised its US storage projection to 204 GW by 2035 even while cutting solar and wind forecasts.

In China the capital is flowing even faster, though across the storage ecosystem broadly rather than into named data-center deals. Chinese venture databases tracked more than 50 energy-storage-related fundraises in the first five months of 2026 alone, spanning cells, materials, systems, inverters, testing, and AI-driven power management. Sunwoda Power (欣旺达动力), one of the companies building AI-data-center-specific storage solutions, closed a RMB 1.68 billion (~$230M) C round at a RMB 26.7 billion valuation. Haier New Energy (海尔新能源) raised RMB 1 billion at a RMB 6 billion valuation. Saudi Aramco and French PE firm Eurazeo co-led a B round valuing 碧澄能源 (Bicheng Energy) at RMB 10 billion.

One startup, 京清数电 (JingQing Digital Power), a storage-inverter maker, raised three rounds in five months. 新能先锋 (New Energy Pioneer) is being funded to build battery testing services, the same layer CATL’s Xiamen lab targets. The data-center-specific market in China is forming through CATL itself: a $600 million acquisition of Zhongheng Electric for data-center power (Zhongheng’s HVDC systems already run in facilities operated by Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu), a $942 million stake making it the largest shareholder of 21Vianet (世纪互联), one of China’s biggest carrier-neutral data center operators, and a 60 GWh sodium-ion order with HyperStrong (海博思创), the largest sodium deal globally. Together the Zhongheng and 21Vianet deals total roughly $1.5 billion and put CATL on both sides of the data center power equation: supply infrastructure and demand.

What This Changes

The economist George Akerlof called it a market for lemons: when buyers cannot verify quality, they price everything toward the worst case, and good products get punished. The energy storage market has exactly this problem. Akerlof’s fixes are certification, warranties, brand, and licensing. CATL’s lab is reaching for nearly all of them.

The dean called the price gap with Tesla “enormous” (巨大) and framed the lab as infrastructure for 出海 (going overseas). A credible validation record gives Chinese integrators like Sungrow, HyperStrong, and Envision bankability they currently lack. CATL’s numbers show where value is heading: ESS gross margin 26.7% against 23.8% for EV batteries, overseas revenue at 31.4%. The premium is in the validated system, not the cell.

The lab is also a competitive move, and not the only one. In EVs, CATL expanded steadily from cells into materials, components, financing, and partnerships with automakers. It did not need to control the entire industry to gain influence over it. The data center investments suggest a similar pattern: Zhongheng extends its reach into power systems, 21Vianet connects it directly to demand, and the validation lab sets the quality standard. Integrators are diversifying cell supply as the market matures. Cell leadership alone is not enough at the system layer. If validation becomes an industry norm, the early mover that built the infrastructure and co-opted the certifiers has a structural advantage, even under an open-access model. Standards may ultimately be set by neutral bodies, and the geopolitical risk on Chinese exports remains regardless of validation quality. But the lab exists, and nobody else has built one.

The burned-out shipping container is still sitting under the test structure in Xiamen, in 38-degree heat, inside a hall the size of a small aircraft hangar. It was not a failure. It was a product that went through the worst conditions anyone could engineer, and the data from its death was recorded. Before batteries become infrastructure, they have to become trusted assets. CATL is building that trust.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Two moods showed up in the same week. Investors poured early money into nuclear fusion and small modular reactors, frontier energy bets priced at valuations that assume a decade of patience, while one of China’s mid-tier battery makers raised a down round at a third below its prior valuation. Long-patience bets at the frontier, a squeeze in the commodity middle.

Where the Money Went

107 deals crossed the wire this week. Of those, 31 disclosed a dollar figure, for a combined total of roughly $1.21 billion (~¥8.7 billion). Treat that as a floor, not a ceiling: most Chinese rounds, especially the early ones, never publish an amount, so the real number is well above what the disclosed deals add up to.

🧠 AI (23 deals)

The busiest sector by deal count, and the one where chips, not models, drew the money. Several rounds converged on one idea: make AI computing cheaper by routing around Nvidia rather than trying to match it head-on. Sparse-computing chipmaker Moffett AI took ¥1 billion (~$139M); its chips skip the math the network does not need, since most of the numbers flowing through a neural network are zeros that contribute nothing, so the chip does more useful work per watt. A cluster of smaller chip startups raised on the same cost-per-answer logic. Disclosed AI capital came to about $251M (~¥1.8B).

⚡ New Energy & Materials (16 deals)

The week’s largest disclosed pool, about $317M (~¥2.3B), spread across battery materials, solid-state electrolytes, and specialty materials. The standout was a markdown rather than a milestone (see Spotlight), but capital also kept flowing toward the next battery chemistry rather than today’s.

🔬 Semiconductors (11 deals)

Mostly early and mostly cheap, around $26M (~¥187M) disclosed, but strategically dense: memory-maker-backed inference chips, compute-in-memory designs (chips that compute where data is stored, avoiding the memory-to-processor shuttling that is one of the largest energy costs in AI hardware), and chip-making equipment. Listed component suppliers showed up as investors, buying a window into the startups building around them.

🤖 Robotics (20 deals)

Money concentrated in components, not finished robots. Force sensors, robot hands, the interchangeable tools a robot arm swaps at its wrist, and the data used to train machines all drew more capital than any finished humanoid. The largest disclosed robotics round, ¥1 billion (~$139M), went to a force-control arm maker rather than a humanoid brand. Disclosed robotics capital was about $235M (~¥1.7B).

💡 Frontier Tech (6 deals)

Small in count, outsized in ambition: two nuclear-fusion startups, a small modular reactor designer, a neutral-atom quantum company (one of the leading approaches to a practical quantum computer, trapping individual atoms with laser beams as the basic units of calculation), and a brain-spine implant maker. Pre-revenue, pre-prototype, and priced like proven leaders. Disclosed capital was only about $42M (~¥300M), but here the headline figures are the valuations, not the cash in.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (7 deals)

Electric air taxis and satellite laser-communication startups led here, about $146M (~¥1.05B) disclosed. The biggest was a ¥1 billion (~$139M) round for a maker of passenger electric aircraft that take off vertically like a helicopter but run on battery motors.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (24 deals)

The catch-all sector and the second busiest, about $196M (~¥1.4B) disclosed: industrial lasers, 3D printing, optical and inspection equipment, and consumer hardware. A ¥900 million (~$125M) raise for an industrial-laser business was the largest.

Spotlight

Sunwoda EVB (欣旺达动力)

Series C, ¥1.68 billion (~$233M), ¥25 billion (~$3.5B) pre-money valuation

The power-battery arm of a listed cell maker, raising at a steep discount.

Sunwoda EVB is the electric-vehicle battery subsidiary of Shenzhen-listed Sunwoda Electronic, and one of China’s larger EV-battery makers, ranked sixth domestically by installed volume in 2025. This week it raised ¥1.68 billion from 13 investors at a pre-money valuation of ¥25 billion. The prior round valued the business at roughly ¥36.4 billion, so this round prices it about 31% lower.

The decline maps the broader battery correction. China makes far more battery capacity than its cars and grid can absorb, and a multi-year price war has crushed margins for everyone outside the two giants, CATL and BYD, which together still hold about two-thirds of the domestic market. Sunwoda EVB ran up roughly ¥8.8 billion (~$1.2B) in cumulative losses across 2021 to 2025, and turned its first quarterly profit, a thin ¥13 million (~$1.8M), only in the first quarter of 2026. The investor rotation matters as much as the valuation cut: the round is led by the investment arms of state banks (ICBC, ABC, and China Post), while the carmaker investors from its 2022 round, NIO, Xpeng, Li Auto, SAIC, and GAC, do not appear among the new backers. State capital stepping in where strategic carmakers stepped out is the shape of a sector correction on a single cap table.

Investors: ICBC Capital (工银资本), ABC International (农银投资), and China Post and Shenzhen state vehicles, among 13 total.

Announcement

Zhibang Lithium (智邦锂电)

Strategic round (de-facto Series A), ¥500 million (~$69M), ¥2.5 billion (~$347M) valuation

A two-year-old solid-state battery materials startup, and a billionaire’s first hard-tech battery bet.

Zhibang Lithium, founded in Quzhou, Zhejiang in March 2024, makes solid-state electrolytes, the component that replaces the flammable liquid inside a normal lithium battery with a solid one, which is the central unlock for safer, denser next-generation batteries. It works across all three competing chemistries (oxide, polymer, and sulfide). It raised ¥500 million at a ¥2.5 billion valuation. The money comes through a fund whose largest backer, at about 82%, is Yangshengtang, the holding company of Zhong Shanshan, the bottled-water billionaire behind Nongfu Spring.

This is Yangshengtang’s first bet on a hard-tech battery-materials company, and it arrives while commodity cell makers like Sunwoda EVB raise at markdowns: capital with no battery history is chasing the chemistry that comes next. The technical anchor is the team. The company’s chief technologist, Xu Xiaoxiong, was chief scientist for solid-state battery research at Ganfeng Lithium, one of the world’s largest lithium players, where he built the program from 2017. With solid-state still years from mass production, this is a wager on where the battery industry goes next.

Investors: Kunshan Gewuzhizhi Fund (昆山格物致知, Yangshengtang-backed), with Quzhou state capital and Xianfeng Changqing (险峰长青).

Announcement

Xingyun Integrated Circuit (行云集成电路)

Pre-A rounds, over ¥400 million (~$56M) cumulative, latest tranche led by Biwin

A Beijing chip startup trying to make AI answers cheap by dropping the most expensive memory.

Xingyun, founded in Beijing in 2023, designs chips for AI inference, the act of running a trained model to answer a query, as opposed to the far heavier work of training it in the first place. Its pitch is a cost end-run. High-end AI chips like Nvidia’s rely on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), fast, costly memory stacked right on top of the processor to feed it data quickly enough to keep it busy, and US export controls now largely deny China access to it. Xingyun instead builds around commodity memory, the cheaper LPDDR and NAND chips found in phones and storage drives. Those chips are slower, but inference draws on memory in shorter, more predictable bursts than training does, so the company claims the trade buys a memory-cost reduction of one to two orders of magnitude. Its all-in-one inference box, called Brown Ant (褐蚁), already runs open models like Alibaba’s Qwen3. This week listed memory-maker Biwin (佰维存储) extended its backing, bringing Xingyun’s Pre-A funding to over ¥400 million.

Ji Yu (季宇), the founder, came out of Huawei’s “Genius Youth” recruitment program, holds a Tsinghua doctorate, and worked on the compiler and architecture for Huawei’s Ascend AI chips, the most developed homegrown alternative to Nvidia’s chip-and-software stack. Biwin’s continued backing shows a listed memory company building around the thesis that cheap Chinese AI compute will run on the memory it already sells, not the HBM it cannot buy.

Investors: Biwin (佰维存储); earlier Pre-A tranches led by 5Y Capital (五源资本), SAIF Partners (赛富投资), and Primavera Capital (春华资本).

Announcement

Lightwheel (光轮智能)

Latest round (labeled Series A+), hundreds of millions of RMB, led by Ant Group

The simulation-data supplier behind some of the world’s best-known robots.

Lightwheel, based in Beijing, builds synthetic training data for robots and self-driving systems: photorealistic virtual worlds where a robot can practice picking up a cup or folding a towel millions of times before it touches the real object, far faster and cheaper than physical trials. This week it raised a new round, reported in the hundreds of millions of RMB and led by Ant Group, with China Renaissance (华兴资本) as financial adviser. The company reached unicorn status (a valuation above $1 billion) in an earlier round this spring; this round’s valuation was not disclosed.

Synthetic training data is infrastructure robot builders need regardless of which hardware wins, provided training in simulation transfers reliably to real machines, and Lightwheel’s customer list suggests the industry has made that bet. It is global and blue-chip: Nvidia names it a partner and connects it to GR00T, Nvidia’s general-purpose robot-brain model, software pre-trained to handle a wide range of physical tasks that robot builders adapt rather than build from scratch, and Lightwheel’s simulated worlds are part of what GR00T trains inside. Nvidia also lists Google DeepMind and Figure among Lightwheel’s users, and the company reports over ¥100 million (~$14M) in revenue and, per its own announcement, around $100 million in first-quarter orders. CEO Xie Chen (谢晨) previously ran autonomous-driving simulation at Nvidia, directed simulation at Cruise, and led it at NIO. Lightwheel is one of the few Chinese startups selling this layer to Western robot leaders, not only Chinese ones.

Investors: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团, lead), CCB Investment (建投投资); China Renaissance (华兴资本) as financial adviser. Reported customers beyond those Nvidia confirms (1X, Toyota Research Institute, Bosch) are company-stated.

Announcement

Qiaotian Intelligent (桥田智能)

Series A+ (second A+), around ¥100 million (~$14M), led exclusively by the National Machine Tool Fund

Not a humanoid, the quick-change tooling that robot factories run on.

Qiaotian, founded in Shanghai in 2016, makes robot end-effectors and the hardware around them: the quick-change “wrists” that let a robot arm swap tools in seconds, magnetic die-change systems, grippers, and industrial connectors. It is unglamorous, essential plumbing for any automated production line. This week it raised around ¥100 million in its second Series A+ round, and the investor is the whole point. The National Machine Tool Industry Investment Fund (国家工业母机产业投资基金), a roughly ¥150 billion state fund created to reduce China’s dependence on foreign precision-manufacturing equipment, took the round on its own.

A national fund whose mandate is the machine tools that make everything else, writing an exclusive check into an end-effector maker, treats quick-change tooling as strategic industrial infrastructure, and it fits the week’s broader pattern of state vehicles leading in hard tech. The company says its core business grew 30 to 40% year over year in early 2026, with customers including Geely; the business is profitable, low-profile, and now state-anointed.

Investors: National Machine Tool Industry Investment Fund (国家工业母机产业投资基金, exclusive).

Announcement

Junhe Atomic (钧合原子)

Angel round, hundreds of millions of RMB, ~¥2 billion (~$280M) valuation

A startup designing small nuclear reactors, founded by the man who sold China’s flagship reactor abroad.

Junhe Atomic, based in Shanghai, designs small modular reactors (SMRs): compact, factory-built nuclear reactors meant to be cheaper and faster to deploy than the giant gigawatt plants, and increasingly pitched worldwide as a clean answer to the electricity demand of AI data centers. The company raised an angel round of hundreds of millions of RMB from more than a dozen investors, with funds earmarked for the conceptual design of its first reactor and team building. The roughly ¥2 billion valuation comes from investor databases and is not confirmed in the announcement; treat it as an early indication on a concept-stage company, not a verified figure.

The founder is why this round attracted more than a dozen investors. Tian Jiashu (田佳树) spent 30-plus years in China’s nuclear industry, served as a deputy chief engineer at both of the country’s nuclear giants, CNNC and CGN, and ran Hualong International Nuclear Power, the joint venture created to sell China’s flagship Hualong One reactor abroad. SMRs are where Western startups like Oklo and X-energy have drawn heavy investor and government backing; China’s are mostly state-run, which makes a privately funded SMR designer with this pedigree rare. A near-term catalyst sits in the background: the state-built Linglong One, the world’s first commercial land-based SMR, is targeting commissioning in 2026, which would de-risk the regulatory path for private players too.

Investors: Lingang Sci-Tech (临港科创), Eastern Bell Capital (东方富海), and Cohesion Capital (聚合资本), among more than a dozen.

Announcement

Dongsheng Fusion (东昇聚变)

New round (labeled Pre-A), hundreds of millions of RMB, co-led by CMC Capital’s carbon-neutrality fund

A fusion startup chasing the cleaner, harder reaction, incubated at a top Shanghai university.

Dongsheng Fusion, based in Shanghai and incubated by Fudan University’s Institute of Modern Physics, is pursuing a particularly ambitious flavor of nuclear fusion. Most fusion efforts fuse deuterium and tritium, which throws off torrents of neutrons that damage the reactor and make it radioactive. Dongsheng targets a deuterium-helium-3 reaction that produces almost no neutrons, which in principle allows a smaller machine that could sit closer to a city. It uses high-temperature superconducting magnets and AI-driven plasma control, and runs an experimental device named Chenguang (晨光). This week it raised a new round, reported in the hundreds of millions of RMB, co-led by the carbon-neutrality fund of CMC Capital.

The deal is a study in how China is pricing frontier science. The founder, Fudan fusion physicist Xu Min (许敏), was recruited in 2025 specifically to build this team; the company was founded only in mid-2025 and raised its angel round in January 2026, drawing a syndicate of Sequoia China, IDG Capital, and Hillhouse. Investor databases put this round’s valuation near ¥3 billion, but no announcement confirms it, and for a company with no demonstrated plasma result and barely a year of history, that figure reflects the team’s pedigree, not any measure of technical progress. Fusion is the highest-conviction, longest-duration bet on this list.

Investors: CMC Capital (CMC资本) carbon-neutrality fund (co-lead); angel backers Sequoia China (红杉中国), IDG Capital (IDG资本), Hillhouse (高瓴), and Fudan Science Park (复旦科创).

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Tianji Intelligent (天机智能). Series B, ¥1 billion (~$139M). Force-control robot arms; one of the week’s largest robotics rounds, co-led by Meituan and Hillhouse, signaling a delivery giant positioning to own the arms behind its automation. Valued at ¥9 billion (~$1.25B).

Moffett AI (墨芯人工智能). Series C, ¥1 billion (~$139M). AI chips built on “sparse computing,” which skips the zero-value math in a neural network to do more work per watt. Valued at ¥6 billion (~$833M).

Beijing Link-Touch (蓝点触控). Series C+, hundreds of millions of RMB. Six-axis force sensors, the touch-sensitive joints that let robots handle delicate objects. Backed this round by carmaker and chip-industry strategics including SAIC. Valued at ¥6 billion (~$833M).

Volant Aerotech (沃兰特航空). Series C+, ¥1 billion (~$139M). Passenger electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft (air taxis). Among the better-funded Chinese eVTOL makers, valued at ¥15 billion (~$2.08B).

Shenfu Jianxing (神复健行). Angel, ¥300 million (~$42M). Implantable brain-spine interface aiming to restore movement after paralysis by rebuilding the signal path between brain and spinal cord. Led by Cathay Capital.

MatriQ (原子矩阵). Series A, hundreds of millions of RMB. Neutral-atom quantum computing, one of the leading hardware approaches to a useful quantum machine. Backed by Monolith and Vertex.

HeyGears (黑格科技). Series C, ¥300 million (~$42M). Industrial 3D printing, with a strong dental-printing position and a majority of revenue from overseas markets.

Xiandao Laser (先导激光). Series A, ¥900 million (~$125M). The laser-systems business of industrial group Xiandao; one of the week’s largest manufacturing rounds, funded by its parent.

Shuowei Photonics (烁威光电). Pre-A, ¥100 million (~$14M). Perovskite solar cells engineered for spacecraft. Perovskite can be made as thin, lightweight films rather than the rigid silicon wafers in normal panels, generating more power per gram, which matters when every kilogram sent to orbit costs a fortune.

Vefan Intelligent (维泛智能). Seed, hundreds of millions of RMB. Brain-inspired chips meant to be a robot’s onboard “brain,” pairing standard processing with spiking neural networks that fire in pulses only when something changes, the way an eye reacts to motion, using a fraction of the power of always-on chips.

The Bigger Picture

The battery glut reaches the cap table

China’s battery industry became the go-to example of its manufacturing scale. This week showed the other side of that scale. Sunwoda EVB, the sixth-largest domestic battery maker by 2025 installed volume, raised at a valuation about 31% below its prior round, with state banks in and the 2022 carmaker investors out.

The underlying problem is overcapacity. In the first eight months of 2024, China produced 419.7 GWh of power batteries but installed only 219.2 GWh in vehicles, an installation rate of just 52%, meaning roughly half the batteries made that year sat in warehouses rather than cars. That gap between output and demand is what forces prices down: factories keep running to cover their fixed costs, inventory piles up, and cell makers cut prices to move it. Prices fell accordingly: as the price of lithium carbonate, the key raw material, collapsed through 2024, battery-cell prices dropped with it. For a manufacturer whose costs are mostly fixed plant and equipment, a sustained price cut on every cell sold can erase a year of profit fast. The pain is not evenly shared. CATL and BYD together still held about 65% of China’s installed volume in 2025, and run their plants at 80 to 90% utilization with healthy margins. The second tier runs at 60 to 70%, and by early 2026 several were near breakeven or in the red on their battery divisions, carrying debt above 60% of assets.

That gap is why this week’s two battery deals point in opposite directions. The commodity-cell maker takes a markdown and a state-bank backstop. The two-year-old solid-state startup, with no revenue, attracts a billionaire’s first battery bet at a ¥2.5 billion valuation. Capital is shifting away from the part of the market that has become a commodity and toward the chemistry that might reset the game. The battery sector is the clearest case of what happens when production outruns demand: output keeps growing, prices fall, and only the leaders with utilization high enough to absorb it stay profitable.

China’s race to build a non-Nvidia compute stack

Xingyun builds inference chips around cheap commodity memory instead of HBM; others raised this week on sparse computing and compute-in-memory designs. The common thread is cost: do AI computing more cheaply, and do it without the parts the US will not sell.

That instinct has a powerful tailwind. US export controls that took effect in late 2024 cut China off from the leading-edge high-bandwidth memory that high-end AI chips depend on, turning memory substitution from a clever idea into a structural necessity. And Huawei is building the rest of the alternative stack in public. In August 2025 it open-sourced CANN, the software layer that lets developers program its Ascend AI chips. That is a direct answer to Nvidia’s CUDA, the programming environment Nvidia has spent nearly two decades turning into the default language of AI development; because nearly every AI tool and library was written for CUDA first, moving to a rival chip has meant rewriting that whole software stack, which is the real lock-in. Opening CANN lets any developer adapt it, the first step toward building the same kind of gravity. In March 2026 Huawei took its Atlas 950 supercomputing system to MWC in Barcelona, its first global showcase of a cluster built entirely on Huawei silicon, interconnect, and in-house memory.

The startups raising this week sit downstream of that push. They do not need to beat Nvidia on raw performance; they need to make Chinese AI workloads run acceptably on parts China can actually obtain and afford. Inference, the day-to-day work of answering queries, is far less memory-hungry than training, which is exactly why a wave of startups is attacking it with cheaper memory and novel architectures. The bet across the sector is the same: in a market walled off from the best imported hardware, the winner is whoever produces acceptable inference at the lowest cost on parts China can actually source.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Capital flows trace where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

The week’s largest disclosed round went to a rocket company, not an AI lab. After StepFun’s $2.5B Pre-IPO absorbed all the attention last week, capital spread wide and the most interesting deals turned up in the gaps: a Starship-architecture rocket in aerospace, a chip company building China’s answer to Nvidia’s NVLink, and a quantum computing angel round with SMIC’s foundry arm at the table.

Where the Money Went

85 deals across seven sectors. 11 disclosed exact amounts totaling $263M (~¥1.9B). Aerospace, which recorded zero deals last week, came back with the week’s biggest disclosed round at ¥500M (~$69M). The stage distribution continues the 2026 barbell: seed and angel bets at one end, a handful of larger rounds at the other, and a thin middle where Series A and B capital would normally concentrate.

🧠 AI (19 deals)

The deals cluster around infrastructure: the systems that sit between raw GPU hardware and the AI models that consume it. OriginFlow (渊澈太初) raised hundreds of millions of RMB at Pre-A for electromyography data infrastructure, capturing the electrical signals from human muscles to train robots to replicate dexterous hand movements. Approaching.AI (趋境科技) raised at a similar scale for the compute-management layer that sits between raw GPU clusters and the AI companies that rent them, scheduling which jobs run on which chips, at what priority, and at what cost. The company claims to process over a trillion tokens per day for customers including Zhipu and Kimi. DeepCybo (深度机智) raised hundreds of millions at Pre-A for PhysBrain, a system that trains robots by watching video of humans performing tasks rather than requiring expensive real-robot training data. HiDream.ai (智象未来) completed a double close, Series B and B+, reportedly with Hefei government funds backing the company across both rounds.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (10 deals)

International stories dominate. Zendure (征拓), covered in Spotlight below, raised a Series B for home energy storage systems already selling across Europe. Yanhe Solar (炎和科技) raised a Series A+ for thin, flexible perovskite solar cells, a next-generation solar technology that works in low light and can be embedded directly into consumer electronics. Yanhe Solar’s cells are already shipping to Lenovo, Signify (the company behind Philips lighting), and Dreame across more than 50 countries. Shanghai Energy Bridge (能量桥) raised at Pre-A for superconducting power distribution, a technology that transmits electricity with near-zero resistance, targeted at AI data centers where power delivery is becoming the binding constraint on how many GPUs you can run.

🔬 Semiconductors (16 deals)

The largest sector by deal count after AI. Tanwei Chiplink (探微芯联), covered in Spotlight, raised hundreds of millions at Pre-A for GPU interconnect chips. WingSemitech (隼瞻科技) raised close to ¥100M (~$14M) at angel for a chip design platform built on RISC-V, the open-source processor architecture that Chinese companies can use without licensing from any American company. Shenzhen Rayhertz Technology (镭赫技术) raised a Series A for semiconductor inspection equipment, the tools that scan chips during manufacturing to catch defects. Four angel-stage semiconductor deals reflect continued seed-level capital formation across the supply chain, from materials to packaging to sensors.

🤖 Robotics (15 deals)

Components and platforms over complete robots. AGILINK (临界点), covered in Spotlight, raised at A+ for dexterous robot hands that supply multiple humanoid manufacturers. Botshare (擎天租) raised at A+ for a platform that rents industrial and service robots by the month rather than requiring factories and warehouses to buy them outright, valued at ¥7B (~$972M), reportedly five months after founding. SEAHI Robotics (世航智能) raised at A+ for maritime robots that clean ship hulls and inspect underwater infrastructure, with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s National SME Development Fund classifying the company as strategic technology. RoboParty (萝博派对), reportedly founded by a 21-year-old, raised tens of millions of dollars at angel for an open-source humanoid robot with Xiaomi backing across multiple rounds.

💡 Frontier Tech (11 deals)

Three brain-computer interface companies raised in this week’s data. See The Bigger Picture below. Juliang Guangqi (矩量光启), covered in Spotlight, raised ¥200M (~$28M) at angel for superconducting quantum computing. NeuraInsight raised a Series A from MiraclePlus (奇绩创坛), the Y Combinator-affiliated accelerator, for a structured database of neuroscience research and brain-activity data used by AI labs studying how biological intelligence works. Three synthetic biology deals covered companies engineering microbes to produce proteins, nutrients, and specialty chemicals through fermentation, an industrial process that can replace petroleum-derived ingredients in food, cosmetics, and materials with bio-manufactured alternatives.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (7 deals)

Back from zero deals last week. Astronstone (宇石空间), covered in Spotlight, raised ¥500M (~$69M) at Series A for a reusable rocket, the week’s largest disclosed round. TransFuture Aviation (华羽先翔) raised hundreds of millions at Pre-A for an electric vertical-takeoff aircraft, with Ant Group leading what is reportedly its first investment in the eVTOL sector. Beijing Interstellar Development (星际开发) raised a Series A for a reusable orbital cargo vehicle, eight years after founding and still without a first flight.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (7 deals)

No single thread across seven deals spanning optical eyewear, 3D printing materials, water treatment membranes, and networking equipment. Shenzhen Zhongjian Technology (众见科技) raised tens of millions at Series A for optical eyewear, backed by SEE Fund and AfterShokz (the bone-conduction headphone company).

Spotlight

Astronstone (宇石空间)

Series A, ¥500M (~$69M), ¥3B (~$417M) valuation

The engineer who helped build China’s heaviest operational rockets is now building a private Starship analog with chopstick catch.

Astronstone is the second chopstick-recovery rocket company we’ve covered in three weeks. In the May 2 edition of The China Round, we spotlighted Cosmoleap (大航跃迁), which raised ¥500M (~$69M) at Series A for a 70-meter, 18-ton-to-LEO vehicle with tower-catch testing underway since November 2024. Now Astronstone has raised the same amount, at the same stage, for the same core architecture: stainless steel airframe, liquid oxygen and methane propellant, and tower-based chopstick recovery. Both target first flight in 2027. Two companies raising ¥500M Series A rounds within three weeks for the same technical approach is a signal that Chinese investors see the Starship architecture as proven enough to back with scale capital, not just one contrarian bet.

The architecture matters because each element solves a specific cost problem. Stainless steel is heavier than carbon fiber but dramatically cheaper to manufacture and more tolerant of the extreme temperatures during reentry. Methane burns cleaner than kerosene, reducing engine refurbishment between flights. Chopstick tower recovery, catching the returning booster with mechanical arms rather than landing it on legs, eliminates the weight penalty of landing gear. The combination makes rockets cheap enough to treat as reusable infrastructure rather than expendable hardware. What distinguishes Astronstone is the founder. Tang Wen (唐文) holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from Tsinghua University and spent years at the First Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), where he worked on propulsion and structural systems for the CZ-5 and CZ-7 launch vehicles. The CZ-5 is China’s heaviest operational rocket. The CZ-7 is the cargo workhorse that supplies China’s space station. Tang’s experience is in the specific engineering discipline, liquid rocket propulsion and structures, that a Starship-class vehicle demands. The company has raised ¥1B (~$139M) across four rounds in one year, with first flight targeted for the first half of 2027. Landspace (蓝箭航天), currently the furthest ahead among Chinese reusable rocket startups, flew its Zhuque-3 on a test mission in late 2025. SpaceX filed its S-1 on May 20 and is set to list in June at a reported valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the largest IPO in history. Two Chinese companies raising ¥500M each for the same core architecture in the same month that SpaceX prices its public offering leaves little ambiguity about where the technology stands.

Investors: Kunlun Capital (昆仑资本, co-lead), Gaorong Capital (高榕创投, co-lead), and 11 others including Xingxiang Capital (兴湘资本).

Announcement

Tanwei Chiplink (探微芯联)

Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation

One of the first Chinese companies building a clean-room alternative to the high-speed links that let Nvidia’s GPUs talk to each other inside AI training clusters.

Tanwei Chiplink builds GPU interconnect chips. When companies train large AI models, they connect thousands of GPUs into a single cluster where each chip needs to communicate with every other at extreme speed. Nvidia dominates this layer through NVLink (the chip-to-chip protocol) and NVSwitch (the switching chip that routes traffic between GPUs), creating a lock-in that goes beyond the GPU itself. Even if a Chinese company builds a competitive AI processor, it still needs the high-speed fabric to connect them. Tanwei’s products, ACCLink and ACCSwitch, target this gap directly: the protocol IP delivers 50-nanosecond latency, fast enough that thousands of chips can coordinate without creating a bottleneck, and can scale to clusters of 4,096 GPUs, large enough to train frontier AI models. The team spun out of Tsinghua University’s Brain-Inspired Computing Research Center.

Inspur Information (浪潮信息), China’s largest AI server manufacturer, invested strategically, a real customer pulling the technology into its server product line. Inspur’s own statement cited “cooperation prospects on smart computing product lines” and noted that Tanwei’s product planning “benchmarks Nvidia’s NVLink+NVSwitch.” Three Beijing government funds, Capital Technology Development Group (首都科技发展集团), Zhongguancun Science City (中关村科学城), and Guozhong Capital (国中资本), all participated, treating GPU interconnect as AI sovereignty infrastructure. Tanwei is not alone in this race: Rongxin Zhiyuan (容芯致远) raised a separate angel round the same week for optical interconnect targeting the same layer, and Hygon (海光信息) published an open interconnect standard last year. But Tanwei is among the first dedicated pure-play chip companies attacking the problem, and Inspur’s strategic investment suggests real engineering engagement behind the capital.

Investors: ShenJing Jiacheng (盛景嘉成, lead), Zhengxuan Investment (正轩投资), Inspur Information (浪潮信息, strategic), iSoftStone (软通动力, strategic), Huagai Capital (华盖资本), Fengnian Capital (丰年资本), Capital Technology Development Group (首都科技发展集团), Zhongguancun Science City (中关村科学城), Guozhong Capital (国中资本), Jinpu Investment (金浦投资), and others.

Announcement

Zendure (征拓)

Series B, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation

A Chinese home energy company ranked first in France and first among independent brands in Germany.

Zendure builds home energy management systems, the hardware and software that let households store solar energy, sell electricity back to the grid during peak pricing, and manage their home’s power consumption automatically. According to company figures, Zendure ranks first in France by total energy storage sales, first among independent brands in Germany, and top three in the Netherlands. Per company, revenue has grown approximately 200% year over year. The company launched PowerHub in Dusseldorf on May 11, a plug-in hub that connects rooftop solar, battery storage, and household loads into one managed system, with shipping starting July 2026. Its ZenWave subscription service automatically buys electricity when wholesale prices drop and sells stored energy back when prices spike.

The round was co-led by Han’s Laser (大族激光), a Shenzhen-listed industrial laser and precision manufacturing company with a market cap exceeding ¥100B (~$14B), alongside DeLink Capital (德联资本). A strategic investment from a laser manufacturer points toward supply chain and hardware production cooperation.

The structural tailwind is European electricity volatility. Wholesale electricity prices rose across the EU in 2025, with widening intraday spreads between solar-generation midday and peak evening demand. That price gap is what residential storage monetizes, and Zendure’s software automates the arbitrage. The EU deployed 27.1 GWh of new battery storage in 2025, a 45% increase and the twelfth consecutive record year, yet over 90% of EU battery manufacturing capacity targets EVs, leaving residential storage largely open to Chinese manufacturers.

Investors: Han’s Laser (大族激光, co-lead), DeLink Capital (德联资本, co-lead).

Announcement

AGILINK (临界点)

Series A+, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥8B (~$1.1B) valuation

The company that makes the hands for China’s humanoid robots raised three rounds in 28 days and landed an LG design win at CES.

AGILINK makes dexterous robot hands, the multi-fingered grippers that allow humanoid robots to pick up objects, turn handles, and perform the kind of manipulation tasks that fixed industrial grippers cannot. The company was spun off from AgiBot (智元机器人) in January 2026, inheriting AgiBot’s existing hand product line and the engineering team behind it. The products it inherited and continues to produce include the OmniHand series: the OmniHand (10 active degrees of freedom, ¥9,800 or ~$1,360), the OmniHand Touch (10 degrees of freedom with tactile sensing, ¥14,800 or ~$2,060), and the OmniHand Pro (12 degrees of freedom). The company shipped thousands of units per quarter in 2025, per its fundraising materials. At CES 2026, LG’s first humanoid robot, CLOiD, used AGILINK’s hands as its core manipulation hardware, a design win that validated the “sell to every body maker” strategy.

AGILINK completed three rounds in 28 days, from founding on January 14 to closing its Series A on February 11. Better to bet on the hands that go into every humanoid robot than to pick a single body maker. As the humanoid sector matures, the market is pricing the component layer, the parts every robot needs, higher than many of the robot makers themselves. AGILINK is not the only company investors are backing at this layer. LinkerBot (灵心巧手), covered in the May 2 edition, has shipped over 10,000 dexterous hands and raised seven rounds in 18 months at a valuation above ¥15B (~$2.1B). The logic behind spinning out hands as an independent company is that humanoid robot makers are competing fiercely on price and form factor, and most will not survive the shakeout. But every survivor needs hands. A standalone hand company can sell to all of them without being locked to one body maker’s fate, and investors can back the category without picking a winner. AGILINK at ¥8B and LinkerBot at ¥15B+ both sit above multiple humanoid body companies that are their customers. The A+ round, recorded in mid-May, was not accompanied by a public announcement. The Series A in February was led by a major internet company, with co-investors including Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Yunfeng Capital (云锋基金), Synstellation Capital, and Joyson Electronics (均胜电子).

Investors (Series A, Feb 2026): Major internet company (lead, unnamed), Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Yunfeng Capital (云锋基金), Synstellation Capital, Joyson Electronics (均胜电子), and others.

Announcement (Series A, Feb 2026)

Juliang Guangqi (矩量光启)

Angel, ¥200M (~$28M), ¥1B (~$139M) valuation

A quantum computing startup raised one of China’s largest angel rounds with a semiconductor foundry’s venture arm at the table, and a team forged at Sandia National Laboratories.

Juliang Guangqi is building a full-stack superconducting quantum computer: not just the quantum processor chip but the entire system, including cryogenic control hardware that cools circuits to near absolute zero, error-correction algorithms that compensate for the fragility of quantum states, and a quantum operating system. Founded in mid-2025 by Yu Wenlong (于文龙), who holds a physics PhD from Georgia Tech and an applied physics degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), with post-doctoral work at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the US Department of Energy’s premier weapons and technology research facilities. A co-founder reportedly worked at NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, on superconducting chip processes. The company claims to have completed China’s first quantum chip produced on an 8-inch industrial wafer, the standard disk size used in high-volume semiconductor factories, a manufacturing milestone marking the shift from lab-built prototypes to factory-scale production.

¥200M (~$28M) is an unusually large angel round for quantum computing, a field where most Chinese startups raise single-digit millions at seed stage. The investor that matters most is SMIC Capital (中芯聚源), the venture arm of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s most advanced chip foundry. Quantum computing chips require sophisticated semiconductor fabrication, and having the foundry’s own investment arm at the table opens a potential path to manufacturing access. The deal has drawn comparisons in Chinese press to a “Fairchild moment”, a reference to Fairchild Semiconductor, the 1957 startup whose manufacturing innovations became the fabrication backbone that other companies built on. The analogy is specifically about foundry access: the argument is that Juliang Guangqi’s SMIC-aligned quantum chip process could become the manufacturing standard other Chinese quantum companies depend on. It is an ambitious claim for a company less than a year old, but the combination of US national laboratory experience, Chinese university pedigree, and foundry alignment is the kind of team composition that makes investors pay up early.

Investors: Junshan Capital (钧山资本, co-lead), Heli Capital (和利资本, co-lead), SMIC Capital (中芯聚源), Yixin Investment (翌昕投资), Yirong Capital (翊荣资本), Qiancheng Capital (千乘资本), Detong Capital (德同资本).

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Botshare (擎天租). Series A+, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥7B (~$972M) valuation. A robot rental platform that sells access to industrial and service robots by the month rather than requiring factories and warehouses to buy them outright. Previously featured in the May 2 edition at Pre-Series A and ¥4.2B (~$580M) valuation with four rounds in 105 days. Now at ¥7B and reportedly six rounds since December 2025. The company reportedly launched an international rental platform in 13 countries in April 2026, with overseas rental prices reportedly running six times the domestic rate.

Yanhe Solar (炎和科技). Series A+, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1B (~$139M) valuation. Thin, flexible perovskite solar cells that work indoors at low light levels, embedded into consumer electronics rather than competing with rooftop solar panels. Products shipping in 50+ countries across 100+ brand supply chains, including Lenovo, Signify, and Dreame. CES 2026 showcase included solar-powered e-paper displays, smart glasses, and cameras. A 100MW production line has been operational in Changde, Hunan since August 2025.

HiDream.ai (智象未来). Series B+, ¥100M (~$14M), ¥5.5B (~$764M) valuation. An image generation model, the kind of AI that creates pictures from text descriptions, large enough to compete with Midjourney and DALL-E. A Series B followed by a B+ in close succession, reportedly with Hefei government funds across both rounds. Per company materials, over one million monthly global users.

TransFuture Aviation (华羽先翔). Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation. Electric vertical-takeoff aircraft. Ant Group (蚂蚁集团) led the round, reportedly its first eVTOL investment. A fintech company with no prior aerospace history moving into air mobility suggests the sector is being repriced from deep-tech moonshot to near-term infrastructure play. Investors: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团, lead), Fosun Venture (复星创富), Bian’an Shidai (彼岸时代).

SEAHI Robotics (世航智能). Series A+, undisclosed amount, ¥3.5B (~$486M) valuation. Maritime robots for ship hull cleaning and underwater inspection. Previously featured in the May 2 edition with simultaneous A+ and A++ rounds and proprietary thrusters rated for 10,000 operational hours versus a 300-400 hour industry standard. The National SME Development Fund, a MIIT-backed policy instrument, entered this round. Investors: GSR Ventures (金沙江创投), Shanghe Dynamics (上河动量), Vertex Ventures (祥峰投资), and others.

OriginFlow (渊澈太初). Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation. Electromyography data infrastructure for training robot manipulation. The company captures electrical signals from human muscles during tasks like grasping and assembly, then converts those signals into training data for robot arms and hands. Investors: BlueRun Ventures (蓝驰创投), Vitalbridge (绿洲资本), and seven others.

RoboParty (萝博派对). Angel, tens of millions USD (~¥144M+), ¥1.95B (~$271M) valuation. Open-source humanoid robot. The founder is reportedly 21 years old. Xiaomi (小米) has reportedly backed the company across multiple rounds. Over $40M (~¥288M) raised pre-revenue for a company whose strategy is to publish its robot design openly, letting a global developer community build applications on top and train the robot’s AI with real-world footage from thousands of users. Investors: Shunwei Capital (顺为资本, lead), Xiaomi Group (小米集团).

DeepCybo (深度机智). Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation. PhysBrain 1.0, a system that trains robots from egocentric human video, meaning the robot learns by watching footage shot from a person’s perspective rather than requiring expensive real-robot demonstrations. Reportedly three rounds in three months and heavily oversubscribed. Investors: Zhongguancun Development Group (中关村发展集团), Puhua Capital (普华资本), Oriental Fortune Ocean (东方富海), and others.

InfiMaker (无限工坊). Series A, close to ¥100M (~$14M), ¥600M (~$83M) valuation. Consumer desktop CNC machines, the kind of precision cutting and carving tools that let hobbyists and small manufacturers work with wood, metal, and plastic at home. The founding team are reportedly DJI alumni. Backed by Meituan (美团) and Kunlun Capital (昆仑资本).

Brainsmart Technology (脑思科技). Angel, tens of millions USD (~¥72M+), ¥325M (~$45M) valuation. Brain-computer interface electrodes and neural decoding systems. One of three BCI companies that raised in this week’s data. See The Bigger Picture. Investors: Kangju Capital (康君资本, co-lead), BlueRun Ventures (蓝驰创投, co-lead), Fosun Health Capital (复健资本).

The Bigger Picture

China Approved the World’s First Commercial Brain Implant, and the Capital Followed

Three brain-computer interface companies raised funding in this week’s data, the downstream effect of a regulatory and policy cascade that compressed months of dealmaking into a sprint.

On March 13, 2026, China’s National Medical Products Administration granted the world’s first commercial approval for an implantable brain-computer interface, a coin-sized wireless electrode array made by Neuracle Medical Technology (神络医疗) that reads signals from the brain’s motor cortex and restores hand movement in paralyzed patients. Two days later, the National Healthcare Security Administration assigned the product an insurance reimbursement code, opening the payment pathway that had blocked hospital adoption. Approval on a Monday, insurance coding by Wednesday. Brain-computer interfaces were reclassified from research bet to healthcare market in a single week.

In August 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other agencies published a national BCI roadmap targeting major technical breakthroughs by 2027 and a complete domestic supply chain by 2030. In March 2026, the Government Work Report explicitly named BCI as a “future industry” to be cultivated alongside quantum computing and 6G. By Q1 2026, the sector had recorded 17 deals totaling ¥3.8B (~$528M), already exceeding the total deal value for all of 2025 in a single quarter.

The global comparison is instructive. Neuralink has implanted more patients and its N1 chip goes deeper into the brain, using intracortical electrodes that penetrate brain tissue rather than sitting on the surface. Its Blindsight vision-restoration implant received FDA Breakthrough Device designation in 2024. But Neuralink remains in clinical trials with no commercial approval, no insurance pathway, and no hospital distribution channel. China’s NMPA moved first, the investment followed across three companies in one week, and the sector is accelerating.

The Component Layer: When the Picks-and-Shovels Companies Outprice the Miners

When you don’t know which gold miner will strike it rich, sell shovels. That logic is playing out across this week’s data in both robotics and AI infrastructure, and the market is pricing the shovel companies aggressively.

AGILINK makes the dexterous hands that go into humanoid robots from multiple manufacturers. Tanwei Chiplink builds the interconnect chips that let GPUs communicate inside AI training clusters. OriginFlow captures electrical signals from human muscles and converts them into training data for robot arms. Three companies, three different technical layers, one shared positioning: they supply critical components to an entire category rather than competing as a finished product.

AGILINK, shipping thousands of hands per quarter with an LG design win at CES, commands a ¥8B (~$1.1B) valuation. That sits above multiple humanoid robot body companies that are its customers. The logic is straightforward: if five humanoid makers each capture 20% of the market, a component supplier embedded across all five captures 100%. AGILINK’s CES partnership with LG proves the strategy works internationally, not just within China’s robotics supply chain.

Tanwei Chiplink applies the same logic one layer deeper. Nvidia controls the AI training stack not just through GPUs but through NVLink and NVSwitch, the high-speed interconnect fabric that lets those GPUs coordinate. Chinese AI chip companies can build competitive processors, but without a domestic interconnect layer, every Chinese AI cluster still depends on Nvidia’s communication backbone. Tanwei’s ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation at Pre-A, with Inspur investing strategically, prices it as AI sovereignty infrastructure.

OriginFlow sits at the data layer. Training a robot to grasp objects, fold towels, or assemble components currently requires either expensive physical demonstrations with real robots, or simulation environments that don’t fully capture how human hands actually move. OriginFlow’s approach, strapping sensors to human arms and recording the electrical signals muscles produce during real tasks, creates a scalable data pipeline that any robotics company can use.

The proto supply chain visible in this week’s data reads: data acquisition (OriginFlow) to compute scheduling (Approaching.AI) to manipulation hardware (AGILINK) to finished robots. Capital is concentrating at each layer independently rather than flowing to vertically integrated robot companies, a pattern that echoes how the smartphone supply chain matured: TSMC, Qualcomm, and Corning became more valuable than most of the phone brands they supplied.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

Last week’s 46 deals reflected the May Day holiday. This week brought 103 across seven sectors, confirming the Q2 2026 funding cycle is fully underway.

103 deals, 28 with disclosed amounts. Those 28 disclosed a combined $3.2B (~¥23.1B), dominated by StepFun’s ~$2.5B Pre-IPO, which alone accounts for 78%. Strip that out and the remaining 27 deals disclosed ~$706M (~¥5.1B). The true weekly total is higher. Most deals don’t publish amounts, and the disclosed figure understates actual capital deployed.

Stage distribution skews heavily early. Angel and seed rounds make up the majority across every sector, with few Series A or B companies and a handful of mega-rounds at the top. The barbell shape that has characterized China’s deep tech funding all year is intact.

🤖 Robotics (23 deals)

The week’s largest deal count, and the most fragmented. No single round dominates the way StepFun does in AI. Vbot (维他动力) raised the headline ticket at ~¥500M (~$69M) Pre-A for a consumer robot dog, but the 23 deals cover consumer companion robots, industrial embodied AI, construction robots, lawn mowers, kitchen robots, wearable exoskeletons, and component suppliers. Fourteen of the 23 were angel or seed-stage, five Pre-A or A, and four strategic or B+ transactions. One straggler: ZeroErr (零差云控, robot system core components, C+, close to ¥100M, ~$14M).

🧠 AI (18 deals, including 3 stragglers)

StepFun at ~$2.5B Pre-IPO dwarfs everything else in the sector. 奕行智能 (EVAS, RISC-V AI chips) took a strategic investment from China Mobile’s chain fund; Motion Brain (眸深智能) raised ¥300M (~$42M) Pre-A for an embodied AI brain targeting humanoid robots; ComNergy Tech (共绩科技) raised close to ¥100M (~$14M) Pre-A for idle GPU compute aggregation. Three AI stragglers were sub-¥10M angel rounds.

🔬 Semiconductors (14 deals)

SemiDrive headlines with a $100M (~¥720M) Series C. China’s most-deployed automotive SoC maker is now pivoting toward humanoid robots. 象帝先计算 raised hundreds of millions in a Series B as its near-death 2024 story converts to an IPO-prep 2026 story. RiVAI Technology (睿思芯科) closed a B+ for high-end RISC-V server processors. Fermion Technology (费勉仪器) closed a C+ for precision scientific instruments used in semiconductor and quantum research. Five of the 14 deals have disclosed amounts; government-affiliated funds led or co-led at least eight.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (16 deals)

The largest sector by deal count after robotics. Lithium Source (常州锂源) took ¥440M (~$61M) strategic investment for LFP cathode expansion. Xinta Green Energy (信塔绿能) raised ¥100M (~$14M) at angel. Multiple early-stage deals in solid-state batteries, power electronics, carbon nanomaterials, and hydrogen water tech. Greater Bay Technology (巨湾技研), the ultra-fast charging battery maker, took an undisclosed strategic round.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (8 deals)

Zero last week, eight this week. All angel or early stage, with a combined $14M in disclosed capital. Beijing Hengxing Power (恒星力量) raised ¥100M (~$14M) at angel for space energy research; Cathay Innovation and 厚雪资本 co-led. Shenzhen Zhiyu Aerospace (执宇航天) raised tens of millions (~$7M+) at angel for small reusable launch vehicles. Shenzhen Qingwei Aviation (庆为航空) closed a Pre-A for fly-by-wire avionics and smart cockpit displays. Vision Aero (维新宇航) raised tens of millions (~$7M+) at angel for a 7-seat eVTOL targeting emergency response. Four additional deals covered satellite propulsion, aerospace electrical interconnects, and microwave remote sensing.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (15 deals)

公大激光 / Gongda Laser headlines with a Series C, hundreds of millions RMB, for its green fiber laser technology, more on this in Spotlight. Yiktong (亦唐科技) raised hundreds of millions in a B+ for high-speed SMT pick-and-place equipment. KeenCool (云酷智能) raised close to ¥100M (~$14M) for liquid cooling equipment for AI data centers. One straggler: 时耘科技 (intelligent robots, angel).

💡 Frontier Tech (9 deals)

微元合成 / Microcyto leads with ¥1.5B (~$208M), a synbio startup that used the round to acquire a ¥900M+/year traditional factory. 雷鸟创新 / Rayneo, the global #1 AR glasses brand by unit volume, closed a C+ round of over ¥1B (~$139M) in January 2026, captured in this week’s data. Two quantum computing startups, Hangzhou Wuwen Quantum (无问清芯) and GGQuanta (国光量子), and a photonic computing chip startup, PhotonCore (光子芯力), raised angel rounds. Genlight (佳量脑科学) shows a C round at an implied ¥60B (~$8.3B) valuation and has no verifiable public presence.

Spotlight

StepFun (阶跃星辰)

Pre-IPO, ~$2.5B (~¥18B), valuation undisclosed

China’s most aggressive LLM fundraiser is heading for Hong Kong, and the companies betting on it build the phones.

StepFun builds large language models, the AI systems behind tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, developing everything from the training infrastructure to the final products. Founder Jiang Daxin (姜大昕) spent 16 years at Microsoft Research Asia, the Beijing lab that trained a generation of China’s AI researchers, before leaving in 2023 to start the company. He holds a PhD from SUNY Buffalo and spent a year as an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore before joining Microsoft. His 2008 best application paper at SIGKDD, one of computer science’s top data mining conferences, on query suggestion was one of the earliest works showing that user behavior data could improve search in ways no engineer could manually design. StepFun’s core products include Step-2, a language model with over a trillion parameters (the internal connections that determine what a model knows and how well it reasons), using a mixture-of-experts design that routes each query to the most relevant specialist sub-networks rather than running every parameter on every question, dramatically reducing cost; Step-Video-T2V, a 30-billion-parameter video generation model that was the best-performing in its class at its February 2025 release; and Step-Audio, a 130-billion-parameter model that handles the full speech pipeline from understanding spoken language to generating natural speech. The company publishes its model code freely on developer platforms, letting anyone download and build on them to lock in developer adoption before the IPO.

The Pre-IPO round closed at approximately $2.5B (~¥18B), with a filing target for Hong Kong by end of June and a year-end listing expected. In January 2026, the company raised a ¥5B+ B+ round led by Shanghai State Capital Pioneer Fund (上国投先导基金), with Tencent following on. Yin Qi (印奇), who co-founded facial recognition company Megvii (旷视科技) and navigated it through a multi-year sanctions saga to a Hong Kong listing, became chairman that same month, suggesting StepFun is treating the IPO as its primary near-term mission. Huaqin Technology (华勤技术) and Longcheer Technology (龙旗科技), the contract manufacturers that design and build most of the world’s Android phones for brands like Samsung and Xiaomi, both invested in the Pre-IPO. ZTE, a major Chinese telecom infrastructure company, also joined and has already embedded StepFun models in mass production inside the Nubia Z80 Ultra. All three manufacture or assemble the devices that would distribute StepFun’s models at scale. If StepFun’s AI ends up embedded in hundreds of millions of handsets, these companies want equity exposure before the IPO.

StepFun’s Pre-IPO, with smartphone ODMs as investors, reflects a broader sorting in China’s LLM cohort. Companies that can scale toward public listings are moving to do so, while those that can’t are pivoting to narrower applications or device-level partnerships.

Investors (Pre-IPO): Huaqin Technology (华勤技术), Longcheer Technology (龙旗科技), ZTE (中兴通讯), and others. B+ round (January 2026): Shanghai State Capital Pioneer Fund (上国投先导基金, lead), Tencent.

Announcement

SemiDrive (芯驰科技)

Series C, $100M (~¥720M), ~¥13B (~$1.8B) valuation

China’s most widely deployed automotive chip maker closes its C round and starts talking to humanoid robot OEMs.

SemiDrive makes the chips that run China’s car cabins, gateways, and control systems. Its X9 series handles what the auto industry calls intelligent cockpit: the dashboard screens, voice assistants, and multi-display environments inside modern cars. Its G9 series manages vehicle gateway functions, routing signals between different vehicle subsystems. Its E3 microcontroller handles smart control tasks like power management and sensor coordination. Together, the product family covers the vehicle’s full electrical and electronic architecture, the hardware spine that connects every sensor, screen, and control system in a modern car. The company has shipped 12 million units, built 100+ mass-production vehicle models into its customer base, and holds relationships with over 260 customers, including 90%+ of China’s domestic automakers and a selection of international automakers. It was founded in 2018.

The Series C was led by Suzhou State Investment (苏产投), with Beijing Yizhuang National Investment (亦庄国投), 京国瑞, and three other investors co-investing. Shaanxi Heavy Truck (陕汽集团) subsidiary 陕汽鸿德投资 joined as a new strategic shareholder, a truck maker integrating up the supply chain. The round values the company at approximately ¥13B (~$1.8B). SemiDrive’s D-series chips are now targeting humanoid robot applications. Automotive-grade chips, tested for vibration, temperature extremes, and long-life reliability in ways consumer electronics chips are not, are a natural fit for industrial robots that operate in harsh real-world environments. The company that supplies cockpit silicon to 90%+ of China’s car makers is positioning for the same role in the robot market.

Investors: Suzhou State Investment (苏产投, lead), Yizhuang National Investment (亦庄国投), 京国瑞, Beijing Municipal Advanced Manufacturing Fund (北京市先进制造基金), Xi’an Finance Group (西安财金), 益中亘泰. Financial advisor: 多维资本.

Announcement

Gongda Laser (公大激光)

Series C, hundreds of millions RMB (~$28M+), ¥1.5B (~$208M) valuation

The company that makes China’s most powerful green fiber lasers just found a second market in the cooling systems inside AI data centers.

Gongda Laser makes short-wavelength fiber lasers, specifically green lasers, which operate at wavelengths that infrared fiber lasers cannot reach. Green light is what you need when you’re welding copper, cutting lithium battery electrodes, or processing silicon in semiconductors, because copper and silicon absorb green wavelengths far more efficiently than infrared. Founded in 2019 by Zhang Fan (张帆), a PhD with 16 years in fiber laser research, the company claims over 80% of the domestic green fiber laser market, a figure repeated in trade press interviews. Per its Series C announcement, it has developed a 4kW continuous green fiber laser, enough power to cut and weld industrial copper at production speed, a level that no known Chinese or Western competitor has reached in this wavelength and form factor. (IPG Photonics, the global fiber laser leader, tops out at around 100W in green; Trumpf offers 3kW at green wavelengths via a disk laser, a different architecture at a different price point.) Revenue exceeded ¥100M in 2023.

Gongda’s sub-company 希禾增材 (Xihe Additive) uses copper-based metal 3D printing to manufacture cooling structures and heat spreaders for AI data center hardware. Copper conducts heat better than aluminum, but it’s harder to process, which is where a high-power green laser becomes essential.

The company has deployed over 100 copper 3D printing units commercially. 禾创致远, affiliated with Zhongji Innolight (中际旭创), Nvidia’s primary manufacturer of optical transceivers, the components that handle high-speed data transmission between servers in AI data centers, invested alongside 华胥基金 (affiliated with Sany Heavy Industry / 三一重工). Dazheng Capital (达晨财智) and Photosynthesis Ventures (光合创投) co-led.

Investors: Dazheng Capital (达晨财智, co-lead), Photosynthesis Ventures (光合创投, co-lead), 禾创致远 (Zhongji Innolight / 中际旭创 affiliated), 华胥基金 (三一集团 affiliated), 力合科创. Huachuang Capital (华创资本) continued from prior rounds.

Announcement

Microcyto (微元合成)

New financing round, ¥1.5B (~$208M), valuation undisclosed

A synthetic biology startup used its ¥1.5B financing round to acquire a sugar alcohol factory generating nearly ¥1B in annual revenue.

Microcyto uses microbial fermentation to manufacture bio-based compounds, essentially programming microorganisms to act as chemical factories, producing sugar alcohols, natural pigments, and functional ingredients from biological feedstocks rather than petroleum or chemical synthesis. Founded in December 2021 by Dr. Liu Bo, who did his doctorate at the CAS Institute of Microbiology, the company has developed a one-step fermentation pathway to allulose, a rare sugar with minimal calories, that China’s National Health Commission approved for commercial sale in 2025, making it the first company in China with regulatory clearance for this production method. Its fermentation process for mannitol, a sugar alcohol widely used in food and pharmaceuticals, converts 99% of the raw input material into product at 99.9% purity.

Part of the ¥1.5B (~$208M) financing is long-term bank debt from Xingye Bank’s (兴业银行) Beijing branch. Banks size credit facilities against physical assets and revenue, so the loan itself is a form of due diligence on the factory being acquired. The money is buying Yusweet (豫鑫糖醇), an Anyang, Henan manufacturer of xylitol, erythritol, and related sugar alcohols operating since 1996 that generated approximately ¥919M in revenue in 2024. Per the company’s announcement, Yusweet is among the world’s leading xylitol producers. Yusweet chairman Zhang Qibin (张其宾) co-invested in Microcyto as part of the deal, becoming a shareholder in the company buying his factory and aligning incentives across the transition.

Synthetic biology companies in China have historically either built new factories from scratch or partnered with contract manufacturers for pilot batches. Microcyto is acquiring an existing industrial asset and upgrading it with bio-manufacturing technology. The factory provides immediate scale; the technology provides margin improvement and the ability to expand into new products that chemical synthesis cannot access.

Investors: Zhang Qibin (张其宾, Yusweet chairman), Xingyin Investment (兴银投资, Xingye Bank’s ¥100B AUM investment subsidiary), Tan Ruiqing (谭瑞清, former Longbai Group vice chairman, 30+ years in chemical manufacturing).

Announcement

Vbot (维他动力)

Pre-A, ~¥500M (~$69M), valuation undisclosed

The ex-Horizon Robotics team that built autonomous driving chips for cars is now shipping autonomous robot dogs to consumers, having just raised the largest single ticket in Chinese consumer robotics history.

Vbot makes consumer robot dogs. The founding team assembled three of the people who built Horizon Robotics, the company that supplies AI chips to Chinese automakers: CEO Yu Yinan (余轶南) was Horizon’s VP and a founding member since 2015; CTO Song Wei (宋巍) was chief architect of Horizon’s software platform; co-founder Zhao Zhelun (赵哲伦) was head of intelligent driving products at Li Auto. The trio left and applied autonomous driving engineering discipline to a product for the home. The Vbot大头BoBo, their first product, runs 128 trillion operations per second of onboard computing power, a level normally found in self-driving car systems rather than consumer gadgets, and does not require a remote control, using vision and AI to navigate independently.

The company was founded in late 2024 and is already shipping. The first 500 units came off the production line and into customers’ hands on May 8th. May’s target is 1,500 total; June’s production target is 2,500+ units per month. The Pre-A of close to ¥500M (~$69M) is, per the company and multiple Chinese tech publications, the largest single financing ticket raised by any consumer robotics company in China. The round had eleven institutional investors, including investors who were present at the seed round continuing with conviction. Xinhua, China’s state news agency, published an editorial this week titled “Capital Accelerates Into Embodied AI, Delivery Capability Becomes Valuation Anchor” (资本加速涌入具身智能，交付能力成估值锚点), with Vbot’s round and shipping timeline as a central example.

The company is separately building a full-size humanoid robot, led by newly hired VP Qin Hailong. The software and hardware architecture overlaps significantly with the robot dog, and the AI stack is designed for reuse across form factors. Deployment data from the robot dog fleet feeds directly into humanoid development. More units in the field means more real-world situations to learn from, the same compounding data advantage that powers Tesla’s self-driving improvements.

Context on the market: Unitree (宇树科技), the domestic leader in quadruped robots, shipped approximately 23,700 units in 2024, representing roughly 69.75% of the global market by unit volume, per GGII, a Chinese robotics industry research firm. Vbot is entering a market that Unitree currently dominates, at a consumer price point (sub-¥10,000, or under $1,400) designed to expand the category rather than compete directly for Unitree’s existing industrial and research customers.

Investors: Dongfang Jiafu (东方嘉富, lead), Huatai Zijin (华泰紫金, lead), Fosun Ruizheng (复星锐正), SAIC-affiliated Shangqi Capital (尚颀资本), 明荟致远. Continuing from prior rounds: Hillhouse Creative Ventures (高瓴创投), Cathay Innovation (凯辉基金), Today Capital (今日资本), BV Baidu Ventures (百度风投), Corsair Capital (渶策资本), 柏睿资本. Financial advisor: Kaihui Capital (高鹄资本).

Announcement

Also on the Radar

• Rayneo (雷鸟创新) — C+, >¥1B (~$139M+), ¥8B (~$1.1B) valuation. Augmented reality glasses that overlay digital information onto the wearer’s real-world view. Global #1 by unit volume (per Counterpoint Research 2025: ~32% global market share, 3.8x overseas sales growth in 2025, Time Magazine Best Inventions 2025 Special Mention). China Mobile (中国移动链长基金) and China Unicom (中国联通联创创新基金) co-invested, the first time two state telecoms have jointly backed the same smart glasses company.

• EVAS / 奕行智能 — Strategic, hundreds of millions RMB (~$28M+), ¥10B (~$1.4B) valuation. AI chips built on RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture that frees Chinese chipmakers from US licensing dependencies. Epoch series in mass production since January 2026. China Mobile’s industry chain fund, which invests in companies building out its supply chain, made the strategic investment this week, following a Series B led by four Beijing government AI funds earlier in 2026.

• Ola Dimensions (欧拉万象) — Angel, hundreds of millions RMB (~$28M+), ¥1B (~$139M) valuation. Founded March 2026. Two rounds in 60 days. Sole founder Zhou Shunbo: former Huawei “genius recruit” (华为天才少年), company-level chief expert in robotics, first Chinese recipient of a best paper honor from IEEE, the world’s largest engineering professional society, in robotics and automation. A deliberate counter-thesis to the perfectionism in consumer robotics: ship an imperfect version one, collect real-world data, iterate rapidly. Two rounds backed by China Merchants Group Ventures (招商局创投) and SAIF Partners (赛富投资基金), among others.

• Lumos Robotics (鹿明机器人) — A1+A2 (announced together), hundreds of millions RMB (~$28M+), ~¥3B valuation. Mitsubishi Electric China led both consecutive rounds. The company’s FastUMI Pro, a tool that captures the movement data robots need to learn tasks, cuts training data collection time by 5x and cost by 80% according to the company, and is claimed to be in use by two-thirds of global robotics AI research labs. A Japanese industrial giant securing access to Chinese robotics AI training tools through back-to-back equity stakes.

• XDXCT / 象帝先计算 — Series B, hundreds of millions RMB (~$28M+), ¥9B (~$1.25B) valuation. A domestic maker of high-performance GPUs, the processors that train and run AI models. Near-death in 2024: accounts frozen in August, hundreds of employees laid off, an investor protection clause triggered that penalizes the company for missing performance targets. Rescued by a new investor (Anfu Technology) in February 2025. Now: stock restructuring planned for H2 2026, IPO advisor signed. The 40% valuation haircut from peak was the price of survival.

• Fangshi Robot (方石机器人) — Series A, close to ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M (~$69M) valuation. Construction robots: spray-coating, floor tile laying, ground leveling. Seven years old. 500+ projects completed, 15M+ square meters covered. Deployed in 10+ countries across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Fortune 500 construction companies as customers. Only now taking its first institutional round.

• Picocom (比科奇微电子) — C+, ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M (~$69M) valuation. Chips that handle the core signal processing in 5G cell towers, built for open radio access networks, an architecture that lets mobile operators mix equipment from different vendors instead of buying locked-in systems from a single supplier. President Peter Claydon’s prior company Picochip dominated the market for small cell base stations, the compact antennas that extend mobile coverage inside buildings and dense urban areas, holding approximately 70% global market share before its $75M acquisition. Beijing and Bristol R&D centers. Now expanding into broadband terminals for low-earth orbit satellite networks like Starlink and China’s equivalent constellations.

• Changyao Innovation (长曜创新) — A+, tens of millions RMB (~$7M+), ¥150M (~$21M) valuation. Lawn mower robots that navigate without buried boundary wires, using six cameras and a depth sensor. Its AIRSEEKERS TRON raised $2.2M from approximately 1,400 backers on Kickstarter in 30 days. US and Europe offices established. Midea-system investor Yingfeng Environment (盈峰环境) led this round. Born on Kickstarter, sold to Western buyers before any domestic launch narrative.

• Greater Bay Technology / GBT (巨湾技研) — Strategic, undisclosed, ¥15B (~$2.1B) valuation. Batteries that can fully charge in 5-15 minutes while storing enough energy per kilogram to power a full-size passenger car, not just a scooter. Production customers span GAC’s passenger lineup (Aion, Trumpchi, Hycan), commercial truck makers including Shaanxi Auto and FAW Jiefang, and EHang’s electric vertical-takeoff aircraft. Five-region manufacturing strategy underway.

• Motion Brain (眸深智能) — Pre-A, ¥300M (~$42M), ¥1.8B (~$250M) valuation. AI software that gives humanoid robots the ability to generate fluid movements, understand the 3D space around them, and run complex AI models directly on the robot’s own hardware rather than relying on cloud servers. Founded by Professor Chen Tao of Fudan University’s Deep Learning Lab and Zhang Yimin, former Chief Scientist at Intel China.

Stragglers

One straggler cleared the notable bar: ZeroErr (零差云控) (robot system core components, C+, close to ¥100M, ~$14M, backed by 华控基金, 同创伟业, and 国泰海通), a component supplier positioning for the robot supply chain buildout.

The Bigger Picture

State Capital Is the Lead Investor in China’s Hardware Sovereignty Push

Government guidance funds, the state-backed investment vehicles China uses to direct capital into strategic industries, usually appear in venture deals as co-investors alongside private firms, filling gaps rather than setting terms. This week, state capital led or co-led at least 30 of the 103 transactions. In semiconductors and aerospace specifically, government funds were the named lead investor in nearly every deal with a disclosed lead.

SemiDrive’s Series C was led by Suzhou State Investment (苏产投). EVAS (RISC-V AI chips) was led, in its prior B round, by four Beijing government AI funds simultaneously, with China Mobile’s chain fund adding a strategic this week. Fangshi Robot’s Series A included AECC Aviation Fund (航发基金), the investment arm of China’s state aero-engine corporation, and Beijing Science & Technology Innovation Fund (北京科创基金). Of the eight aerospace deals this week, most involved government-affiliated funds as leads or sole investors.

In December 2025, Beijing announced a national venture capital guidance fund seeded with ¥100B (~$14B) in central government capital, structured to mobilize ¥1T (~$138B) over 20 years through 600+ sub-funds targeting integrated circuits, quantum technology, aerospace, and biomedicine with a mandate to put at least 70% into seed and early-stage companies, per the NDRC launch announcement and reported by Caixin. Five months later, this week’s deals are early evidence of that system deploying.

The broader system has been building for a decade. China’s government guidance fund network now comprises over 2,000 funds with a confirmed total of more than $500B raised. State capital now provides the majority of the money backing China’s venture and private equity funds. In effect, the government is the biggest investor in the investors. The semiconductor-specific vehicle, the “Big Fund” (国家集成电路产业投资基金), has escalated in each phase: ¥98.7B in 2014, ¥204B in 2019, ¥344B (~$47.5B) in its third phase launched May 2024, now fully operational with Phase III focused specifically on equipment and materials, the parts of the chip supply chain most vulnerable to US export controls.

SemiDrive is the domestic alternative to NXP and Renesas in automotive chips. EVAS is building AI chips on an open architecture that no US company can sanction. Fangshi Robot deploys into construction sites across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In each case, government capital is backing companies that reduce Chinese dependence on foreign suppliers.

China’s Big Model Endgame: The Device-Embedded AI Race

The framing that has dominated analysis of China’s large language model startups, often called the “six small tigers” (六小虎), is no longer useful. It describes a 2024 world that has already reorganized.

The company raised approximately $2.5B (~¥18B) at a valuation targeting around $10B for its Hong Kong IPO, expected before year-end. Huaqin Technology and Longcheer Technology, the two largest contract manufacturers of Android smartphones globally, joined the Pre-IPO round. ZTE, which builds China’s domestic telecom infrastructure, also invested and has already embedded StepFun models in mass production inside the Nubia Z80 Ultra.

The chatbot and API subscription model that defines Western LLM revenue is a difficult path in China. The domestic market for consumer AI subscriptions is competitive and price-sensitive. The more durable model, and the one that smartphone manufacturers are betting on, is embedding AI at the device level, where models run directly on the phone’s own processor and manufacturers pay for licensing or co-development rather than end-users paying per query. Frost & Sullivan estimates the global on-device AI market at ¥1.2T (~$167B) by 2029, growing at 39.6% per year. Vivo, which shipped 103.9 million phones in 2025 per IDC, has already built a 3-billion-parameter AI model running directly on the phone’s own processor into its device lineup; ByteDance’s Doubao AI assistant runs as part of the phone’s operating system rather than as a standalone app, making it available across everything the user does on the device.

The smartphone manufacturers investing in StepFun’s Pre-IPO make the devices that would embed its models at scale. Equity exposure before a successful IPO is cheaper than negotiating licensing terms after one.

The cohort, as it now stands: Zhipu AI listed in Hong Kong in January 2026. MiniMax is IPO-bound. StepFun is filing by end of June. Kimi raised $2B at a $20B valuation last week. Baichuan AI has pivoted to medical AI. 01.AI has contracted its pre-training team. Benchmark leaderboard competition has given way to a race for device distribution and manufacturer licensing.

Synthetic Biology’s Industrial Graduation

Synthetic biology has spent a decade in China promising to replace petroleum chemistry with biological manufacturing. Most of that promise has lived in pilot plants, research institutes, and funding decks. The Microcyto deal this week suggests the sector may be crossing that gap, through acquisition of existing industrial infrastructure.

The ¥1.5B (~$208M) financing includes long-term bank debt from Xingye Bank’s Beijing branch. Banks size credit facilities against physical assets and revenue. For the loan to clear, the fermentation tanks, processing lines, and distribution relationships of 豫鑫糖醇 had to stand as collateral.

Yusweet (豫鑫糖醇) has been producing xylitol and related sugar alcohols in Anyang, Henan since 1996, with nearly ¥1B in annual revenue. Microcyto brings fermentation-process manufacturing at higher efficiency and purity than chemical synthesis, with the ability to expand into new products (allulose, rare sugars, functional ingredients) that traditional manufacturers cannot produce. Its one-step fermentation route to allulose received National Health Commission regulatory approval in 2025, the first in China. Yusweet chairman Zhang Qibin co-invested in Microcyto, taking equity upside from the technology transformation of his own company.

China’s biomanufacturing sector produces over 70% of global bio-fermentation output and generates approximately ¥1.1T (~$153B) in annual market value, growing at 30% per year since 2015. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, the government’s top-level economic blueprint for 2026-2030, designates biomanufacturing as one of seven “future industry” priority tracks, the same tier as quantum technology and brain-computer interfaces. The government has funded 43 pilot plant projects nationwide and issued dedicated support programs in 20+ provinces.

For decades, legacy industrial companies acquired synthetic biology startups for technology access. Microcyto reversed the direction, buying the factory and bringing the biology to upgrade it.

Further context from Xinhua on China’s biomanufacturing industrial strategy, February 2026.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

The China Round is a weekly report tracking venture and strategic investment activity across China’s core technology sectors: AI, robotics, semiconductors, new energy and materials, aerospace and defense, and frontier tech.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

Whether you were celebrating Labor Day, Cinco de Mayo, or just enjoying a long weekend, China’s five-day May Day holiday (May 1-5) kept most dealmaking on hold.

46 deals, $2.39B (~¥17.2B) in disclosed capital across nine of them. That number needs context: Kimi’s $2B D-round accounts for 84% of the total. Strip it out and 45 deals generated $390M (~¥2.8B). AI led on deal count at twelve, with robotics close behind at ten. No aerospace deals.

🧠 AI (12 deals)

One deal dominates the entire week: Kimi’s $2B (~¥14.4B) D-round at a ~$20B (~¥144B) valuation, the largest Chinese LLM startup round of 2026. Beneath that headline, two AI infrastructure companies raised a combined ¥1B+ (~$139M+) in the same week with identical “token factory” positioning: Infinigence AI at ¥700M+ (~$97M+) and Magik Compute at hundreds of millions. Nanochap took a ¥300M (~$42M) strategic round for biomedical chips targeting visual brain-computer interfaces, a medical device company tagged as “AI” on deal trackers. The remaining deals include PixelBloom’s C-round for its AiPPT product (30M+ registered users globally), a medical LLM angel (WiseDiag, ¥65M / ~$9M), a spatial intelligence platform strategic round (XGRIDS), and four late-reported deals spanning industrial cognitive AI, AI infrastructure cloud, and AI-driven drug discovery.

🤖 Robotics (10 deals)

RoboScience pulled the largest robotics round of the week at ¥1B (~$139M) for its VLOA embodied AI platform. The remaining main-window deals are earlier-stage: Eagle Vision raised a Pre-A for bionic flapping-wing flying robots with a consumer product targeting the global hobbyist market, Westlake Robotics for civilian quadruped robots, Knownobound for industrial embodied AI targeting ship maintenance and container logistics, and underwater robotics veteran Boya Gongdao closed a D+ round. Five late-reported deals brought the sector total to ten, including a Sequoia China-backed angel in smart robots and a strategic round in core robot components backed by iFlytek Ventures and Hillhouse.

🔬 Semiconductors (8 deals)

Eight deals spanning the full chip stack, from data center networking to automotive SoCs to photonic interconnects. Yunsilicon builds what it describes as China’s first 400Gbps RDMA data center networking chip, positioning it as the domestic alternative to Nvidia’s ConnectX; ByteDance and Inspur hold strategic equity stakes. Oritek closed a C-round for automotive zone controller SoCs, with SDIC Merchants participating in every round from B1 through C and eight listed auto companies as shareholders. Siminwei drew three top-tier VCs (Oriental Fortune Capital, GGV Capital, Detong Capital) to co-lead a seed at a ¥500M (~$69M) valuation for AI inference architecture, an unusually heavy syndicate for a seed. Rhinoptix raised for TFLN photonic chips, the post-copper datacenter interconnect technology covered in the April 10 issue. Sicred continues scaling SiC power devices with 100,000+ units shipped to aerospace and defense customers.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (7 deals)

Tachin Tech raised a Pre-A for electronic skin targeting the humanoid robot market, with core technology from Zhenan Bao’s Stanford lab. Makera closed a Series A for consumer desktop CNC machines after raising $10.2M on Kickstarter. Three smaller deals: a smart lighting company in Shenzhen (Mingyuda, ¥30M HKD / ~$3.8M), a consumer electronics angel backed by Co-Creation Ventures, and a miHoYo-backed equipment investment. Two late-reported deals added a metal 3D printing angel and a high-speed SMT equipment strategic round.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (5 deals)

BYD invested directly in battery electrolyte materials maker Huasheng Xianghe (strategic, hundreds of millions RMB), continuing its vertical integration down the EV supply chain. Hebang New Materials raised a ¥100M (~$14M) A-round for bio-based composite materials certified to EU high-speed rail standards. Three late-reported deals added carbon-based energy storage materials and emerging energy tech to the tally.

💡 Frontier Tech (4 deals)

STARTORUS closed a ¥500M (~$69M) A+ for its fusion energy reactor, crossing the $1B (~¥7.2B) valuation mark. Greencloud, a subsidiary of listed Wangsu Technology, raised for immersion liquid cooling with partnerships across Intel, Dell, and BASF. Nanoloop took a seed for sports brain-computer interface wearables at ¥10M+ (~$1.4M+). One late-reported deal: Boyin Bio raised an A-round for biomaterials from Legend Capital, CAS Advanced Industry Fund, and Cornerstone.

Other sectors

No aerospace or defense deals this week.

Spotlight

Kimi (月之暗面)

Series D, $2B (~¥14.4B), ~$20B (~¥144B)

China’s best-funded independent LLM startup hits frontier parity and raises the largest Chinese AI round of 2026.

Kimi is an LLM platform built by Moonshot AI. K2.6, released April 2026, beats or matches GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro across coding, reasoning, and agent benchmarks, topping the field on Humanity’s Last Exam, DeepSearchQA, and SWE-Bench Pro. The K2.5 launch in January triggered a subscription surge of over 8,000% in a single month. Annual recurring revenue broke $100M (~¥720M) by March 2026 and exceeded $200M (~¥1.44B) by April. Founder Yang Zhilin studied at Tsinghua and CMU, worked at Google Brain and Meta AI, and co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet, two foundational papers in the architecture behind modern LLMs.

Meituan Longzhu, the venture arm of China’s largest local services platform, led with over $200M (~¥1.44B). Meituan operates food delivery, ride-hailing, hotel booking, and grocery for 700M+ annual transacting users. If Kimi becomes the AI layer inside those services, that means agentic AI embedded in hundreds of millions of daily purchasing decisions. China Mobile’s innovation fund and CPE Yuanfeng co-invested, adding state telco infrastructure and financial capital alongside commerce, each representing a different distribution thesis for the same model. The valuation jumped from $4.3B (~¥31B) in December 2025 to $20B (~¥144B) in six months, with approximately $3.9B (~¥28B) raised in that sprint.

Meituan Longzhu (美团龙珠, lead), China Mobile Innovation Fund (中移创新产业基金), CPE Yuanfeng (CPE源峰), and Shuimu Capital (水木资 本).

Announcement

STARTORUS (星环聚能)

Series A+, ¥500M (~$69M), exceeded $1B (~¥7.2B+)

China’s latest fusion unicorn, building a reactor geometry no other company has attempted at commercial scale.

STARTORUS is building a compact fusion reactor: a spherical tokamak, which uses powerful superconducting magnets to contain hydrogen plasma heated to hundreds of millions of degrees inside a doughnut-shaped chamber. STARTORUS’s approach uses a plasma geometry called negative triangularity. In standard tokamaks, the edge of the plasma periodically erupts in instabilities that blast over 1 GW per square meter into the reactor wall, a problem that has plagued the field for decades. Negative triangularity reshapes the plasma cross-section to suppress these eruptions entirely, reducing wall damage and improving energy confinement. STARTORUS claims to be the first company building a commercial spherical tokamak natively around this geometry. (The University of Seville’s SMART research tokamak achieved first plasma with negative triangularity in January 2025, but as an academic device, not a commercial reactor.) The NTST device begins installation in September 2026 at the company’s Shanghai Jiading base, with the demonstration reactor 星环一号 (CTRFR-1) targeted for construction in 2028, design targets by 2029, and electricity output around 2032. Chief Scientist Tan Yi has spent over 20 years in fusion research since entering Tsinghua’s Department of Engineering Physics in 1999.

The A-round in January (¥1B / ~$139M, led entirely by Shanghai state capital) broke the domestic record for a single private fusion round. The A+ brought 11 new investors four months later, pushing cumulative funding past ¥2B (~$278M). At a valuation exceeding $1B (~¥7.2B+), STARTORUS joins NeoFusion (聚变新能) in a small club of Chinese private fusion unicorns, in a field where fusion energy generates zero watts commercially anywhere on Earth. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, and Helion have each raised more capital, but none uses negative triangularity. If NTST produces results in late 2026, STARTORUS enters a global race with technically differentiated physics.

Dachen Finance (达晨财智), Jinpu Investment (金浦投资), Shenneng Chengyi (申能诚毅, Shenergy affiliate), Sunshine Ronghui Capital (阳光融汇资本), Industrial Securities Capital (兴证资本), Songqing Capital (松青资本), Hongtai Fund (洪泰基金), Sanyuan Capital (三元资本), Jingming Capital (京铭资本), Yinggang Capital (盈港资本), and Feitu Ventures (飞图创投, returning from A-round).

Announcement

Makera (造物时代)

Series A, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M)

$10.2 million on Kickstarter in 45 days. A Chinese consumer hardware brand built for the global maker market from day one.

Makera builds consumer desktop CNC machines that bring precision machining to workshops, research labs, and home studios. CNC machines carve, cut, and engrave materials using computer-controlled toolpaths; industrial units cost $50,000 or more. Makera puts comparable capability on a desktop for under $1,000. The Z1, launched on Kickstarter in late 2025, raised $10,245,134 from 6,927 backers in 45 days.

Its earlier products, Carvera and Carvera Air, held the top two spots among CNC campaigns on Kickstarter before the Z1 surpassed both. Products are used at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and, per the company, at over 1,000 enterprise and university customers including Apple, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Full-year 2025 revenue grew over 400% and Q1 2026 is tracking nearly 300% year-on-year, per the company’s Series A announcement.

The Series A came less than eight months after Qiming Venture Partners’ Pre-A, with Qiming investing well above its proportional share of the round, a strong conviction signal from one of China’s top VCs. The co-lead is Beijing’s Municipal AI Industry Investment Fund, an unusual backer for consumer hardware, suggesting the fund sees the intelligent CAM software layer as part of its AI mandate. Makera was never a “China company going global.” It was born on Kickstarter, priced in dollars, and validated by Western makers before any domestic narrative. In a week dominated by AI infrastructure and robotics, Makera is the clearest evidence that China can build global consumer hardware brands, not just supply chains.

Meridian Capital (华映资本, co-lead), Beijing Municipal AI Industry Investment Fund (北京市人工智能产业投资基金, co-lead), Oriza Puhua (元禾璞华), CASIC Ventures (中科创星), TsingVenture (清科创投), and Qiming Venture Partners (启明创投, returning).

Announcement

Infinigence AI (无问芯穹)

Series B, ¥700M+ (~$97M+), ¥7B (~$970M)

One of China’s best-funded AI infrastructure startups, betting that the token production layer becomes the durable moat in AGI.

Infinigence AI builds inference and training infrastructure that runs across multiple chip architectures simultaneously. Where most AI companies optimize for Nvidia GPUs, Infinigence orchestrates workloads across AMD, Huawei Ascend, Moore Threads, and seven other domestic chip families, turning heterogeneous hardware into a unified compute pool. The platform hosts over 160 models and serves enterprise clients whose daily token call volume has grown 20x year-on-year. The Tsinghua NICS lab spinout positions itself as a “token factory,” a framing its CEO used at a March 2026 industry forum: converting raw compute into AI tokens the way a refinery converts crude into usable fuel. Cumulative funding now exceeds ¥2.2B (~$306M), with 15 investors in this round alone.

The thesis is that AI models will commoditize, as DeepSeek’s open-source success suggests, but the logistics layer (scheduling across fragmented chips, optimizing for cost and latency, routing traffic between models) will not. This is the AWS argument applied to AGI: the largest cloud provider did not build the most applications; it built the best infrastructure for running them. The risk is equally visible. China’s hyperscalers (Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Huawei Cloud) run their own inference platforms. ByteDance runs Doubao inference internally. The token factory thesis works for the long tail of agent startups and enterprise AI deployments. Whether it works against vertically integrated giants is the open question that ¥2.2B in cumulative capital is now testing.

Hangzhou High-Tech Capital (杭州高新金投, co-lead), Huiyuan Capital (惠远资本, co-lead), Guoxing Capital (国兴投资), Qinhuai Data (秦淮数据), and others. Returning: Legend Capital (君联资本), Shanghai Guotou Futeng (上海国投孚腾), Yuanzhi Future (元智未来).

Announcement

RoboScience (机科未来)

Series A, ¥1B (~$139M), ¥5B (~$694M)

Founded in late 2024, Series A by May 2026 with no shipping hardware. The same architectural bet as Physical Intelligence in the US.

RoboScience is building an embodied AI platform centered on VLOA (Vision-Language-Object-Action), a model that learns to control robots the way language models learn language: absorb massive amounts of visual and manipulation data, then generalize to tasks it has never seen. Instead of programming a robot arm to pick up a specific object with a specific motion, you show it millions of examples and let it figure out the movements itself. The approach mirrors Physical Intelligence’s Pi model in the US. The company has accumulated over one million hours of manipulation data, growing at tens of thousands of hours per week. Co-founder Tian Ye was Apple’s AI platform technical lead after earning his MS at Stanford under Andrew Ng. Co-founder Lin Shao is an NUS assistant professor with a Stanford AI Lab PhD whose D(R,O)Grasp framework won the Best Paper Award for Robot Manipulation at ICRA 2025, the field’s top international conference.

¥1B for a company roughly 18 months old with no shipping hardware is aggressive, but within the norms of China’s embodied AI funding cycle; Galbot raised a comparable amount at a similar stage. The unnamed investor list, described only as “domestic and international industry giants and top financial institutions,” is its own signal: in China’s AI market, investor anonymity usually means either strategic sensitivities or credentials that don’t match the framing. Early investors include JD.com (angel lead, a company that operates one of China’s largest logistics networks), Merchants Capital, and SenseTime’s venture arm. JD.com’s involvement points to the deployment thesis: last-mile logistics as the proving ground for general-purpose manipulation. The question is whether VLOA’s data-scale approach produces generalizable robot intelligence faster than the task-specific approaches used by companies already shipping thousands of units.

JD.com (京东, angel lead), Merchants Capital (招商局创投), SenseTime Guoxiang Capital (商汤国香资本), Zero One Ventures (零一创投), Puhua Capital (普华资本, Pre-A lead), and others. Series A investors undisclosed.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Tachin Tech (途见科技) — Pre-A + Pre-A+, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥600M (~$83M)

Electronic skin for robots. 400 sensors per square centimeter detecting pressure, temperature, shear force, texture, and proximity. Founder Lai Jiancheng was a Stanford postdoc in Zhenan Bao’s lab, one of the world’s leading groups in flexible electronics. The haptic data collection glove is the clever wedge: sell the training data tool (human demonstrations converted to robot learning data) before the full-body robot skin market matures. Lenovo Star (联想之星) leads; Huakong Fund (华控基金) and Oriza Puhua (元禾璞华) co-invest.

Announcement

Yunsilicon (云脉芯联) — B-round, hundreds of millions RMB (~$42M+), ¥7B (~$970M)

The YSA-100, which the company describes as China’s first 400Gbps RDMA data center networking chip, has been in mass production since 2024 and positions the company as a domestic alternative to Nvidia’s ConnectX series. CEO Liu Yongfeng previously led networking chip development at Cisco, Alibaba, and Huawei. ByteDance (8.42%) and Inspur (6.86%) hold strategic equity stakes. The reported investor list includes the National IC Fund, Shanghai IC Fund, and National AI Industry Fund. Three national-level semiconductor and AI funds in a single chip startup would be unusual; worth watching for public confirmation.

Oritek (欧冶半导体) — C-round, hundreds of millions RMB, ¥1.5B (~$208M)

Automotive SoC chips for third-generation electrical/electronic architecture, the “central computing + zone control” design that the entire global auto industry is migrating toward. Oritek’s Gongbu series zone controller chips are among China’s first domestic entries in this segment. Eight listed auto-industry companies are shareholders, including SAIC, Xingyu, AAC Technologies, and Sunny Optical. SDIC Merchants has participated in every round from B1 through C.

Announcement

Nanochap (暖芯迦) — Strategic, ¥300M (~$42M), ¥1.5B (~$208M)

Biomedical chip company developing visual brain-computer interfaces competing with Neuralink’s Blindsight. R&D center in Melbourne, 13 international patents, and an EPC001 chip that reads ECG, PPG, EEG, and EMG signals simultaneously. Tagged “AI” on deal trackers but this is a medical device company at its core. The team holds dual degrees across electrical engineering and biomedicine, with veterans from major semiconductor companies.

Legend Capital (君联资本, lead), Guangfa Xinde (广发信德).

PixelBloom / AiPPT (像素绽放) — C-round, undisclosed, ¥250M (~$35M)
AI presentation generation tool with 30M+ registered users across 180+ countries, ranked #4 globally in the AI PPT vertical and #1 among startups in China. Founded in Singapore in 2018, making it a genuinely global-first product rather than a China-domestic pivot. The modest C-round valuation suggests either an undervalued global product or a structured round.

CASIC Capital (国科投资, co-lead), Guoxiang Capital (国香资本, co-lead), Cornerstone Ventures (基石创投).

Rhinoptix (犀里光电) — Pre-A, tens of millions RMB, ¥150M (~$21M)

Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic chips for data center optical interconnects. Founder Prof. Wang Cheng co-invented TFLN electro-optic modulators at Harvard and holds a Tsinghua undergrad. TFLN switches light signals roughly 10x faster than silicon photonics, the leading candidate for post-copper datacenter connections as AI clusters push past 1.6 terabits per second. Founded January 2025 and already raising, a pace that reflects strong VC confidence in the technology.

Lenovo Ventures (联想创投), Oriza Origins (元禾原点).

Sicred (至信微电子) — B-round, undisclosed, ¥150M (~$21M)

SiC MOSFETs (silicon carbide power switches that handle high voltage more efficiently than traditional silicon) for aerospace, defense, and industrial power conversion. 100,000+ units shipped at 1200V/7mΩ with over 90% yield. Founder Zhang Aizhi previously worked at STMicroelectronics and Huarui Micro, bringing 20+ years in power device design. SiC is a critical technology for global EV and industrial electrification, and Sicred’s shipping volume at B-round stage is unusual.

China Venture Capital (中国风投), Tianhu Fund (天互基金).

Greencloud (绿色云图) — A-round, undisclosed

Immersion liquid cooling for AI data centers, claiming a PUE of 1.049, meaning 95% of energy goes to compute and only 5% to cooling. Subsidiary of listed Wangsu Technology (603000.SH). Strategic partnerships with Dell (2023), Intel co-development (2024), and a BASF joint lab for biodegradable coolant (2025). As AI training clusters demand increasing power density, the thermal management layer is becoming infrastructure, not an accessory.

Yunze Capital (云泽资本).

Eagle Vision (鹰瞰智翼) — Pre-A, tens of millions RMB, ¥150M (~$21M)

Bionic flapping-wing flying robots and a proprietary fluid simulation engine. Consumer product “Dante” targeting global hobbyist and enthusiast markets with stunt flying capabilities, with a Kickstarter campaign for global distribution. Core team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with PhD-level backgrounds in robotics and control. A left-field entry in a week dominated by humanoid robots and LLMs.

Oriza Origins (元禾原点).

Hebang New Materials (禾邦新材) — A-round, ¥100M (~$14M), ¥500M (~$69M)
Bio-based composite materials from plant biomass, specifically extracting high-purity lignin from agricultural straw using an enzymatic process the company describes as a world first in commercialization. 25% carbon intensity reduction versus petroleum-based epoxy. Certified to EN45545 (EU high-speed rail fire safety standard) and UL94 V-0. Applications: aerospace, transportation, and high-end equipment. Sustainable materials with real certifications, not just a green narrative.

Changjiang Capital (长江资本), Hefei Innovation Investment (合肥创新投资).

The Bigger Picture

Two Token Factories, Same Week, Same Pitch

Two companies raised ¥1B+ combined on the same thesis within 48 hours of each other: the data center as “token factory.”

Infinigence AI (¥700M+ B-round) and Magik Compute (魔形智能) (hundreds of millions Pre-A) both position themselves as “token factories,” middleware layers that convert raw compute from heterogeneous chip pools into AI inference tokens at scale. Infinigence is the Tsinghua spinout profiled in Spotlight above; Magik Compute, founded June 2024 by former Alibaba Cloud and Bitfusion executives, is building software-hardware co-optimized compute clusters for the same market from a different angle.

The demand side supports the bet: China’s daily AI token call volume hit 1.4 quadrillion in March 2026, a 1,000x increase in two years per Xinhua, citing official data. Kimi’s own capacity crunch in early 2026, documented by TMTPost, saw users turned away because inference supply could not meet demand.

But the composition of that demand matters. ByteDance’s Doubao alone accounts for 1.2 quadrillion tokens per day as of March 2026, roughly 86% of the national total, all served on ByteDance’s own Volcengine infrastructure. The token factories are not competing for that volume. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Zhipu AI build their own inference infrastructure and monetize spare capacity through their own platforms. Kimi solved its shortage internally with software optimization rather than outsourcing. The token factory thesis holds for the long tail: agent startups, enterprise AI deployments, and smaller model companies that lack the scale to justify proprietary GPU clusters. Whether that long tail produces durable revenue before China’s hyperscalers expand downmarket is the bet that ¥1B+ in same-week capital is now testing.

Built Global, Not Going Global

Three companies in this week’s batch illustrate different modes of global competitiveness, none following the traditional Chinese playbook.

Makera raised $10.2M on Kickstarter for a desktop CNC machine, with a predominantly Western backer base. PixelBloom’s AiPPT serves 30M+ registered users across 180+ countries from a Singapore-incorporated entity. Both were global products before they became Chinese tech stories, built for foreign users from day one. Kimi’s path is different. K2.6 competes directly with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on the benchmarks that define the global AI frontier, even though Kimi’s revenue comes overwhelmingly from Chinese users.

The traditional model is “先做国内再出海” (build at home first, then go overseas). A newer pattern is emerging: companies that set up overseas operations from inception and validate product near end users without a domestic-first phase. TechNode’s Born Global 2026 Awards and CGTN’s analysis of China’s next-gen global enterprises cover the same shift. Chinese companies’ overseas revenue ratio stood at 16.7% in 2024 per CICC, with Goldman Sachs projecting 20.6% by 2028. Companies like Makera and PixelBloom are part of the reason.

Why These Deals Couldn’t Wait

46 deals versus 100-plus in normal weeks. The May Day break (May 1-5) shut the marginal deals down, but the rounds that closed during the holiday all had reasons they couldn’t pause.

Commercial breakout on a clock. Kimi’s ARR doubled in a single month. When revenue is accelerating that fast, every week of delay means a higher valuation for incoming investors. Meituan closed at $20B before the next step-up. Makera’s revenue was tracking 300% year-on-year post-Kickstarter, and Qiming wanted to load up before the metrics cooled.

Construction deadlines. STARTORUS needs capital before the NTST device installation begins in September 2026. The 11 new A+ investors closed in four months because fusion reactor construction schedules do not care about national holidays.

Category definition races. Infinigence AI and Magik Compute both announced within 48 hours, racing to establish the “token factory” category. When two companies pitch the same thesis to the same investor base, whoever closes first sets the narrative. Waiting a week means the other company’s press coverage defines the category for you.

The 50-plus deals that did not happen this week were the ones that could afford to. What closed: AI infrastructure, frontier energy, and globally validated products.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

129 deals in seven days, $847M (~¥6.1B) in disclosed capital. Aerospace and defense led on dollar volume at $370M across 11 deals, the lowest deal count of any sector, driven by Volant Aerotech’s $300M Series C and Cosmoleap’s ¥500M (~$69M) Series A; no other sector crossed $200M. Robotics followed at $200M across 19 deals, concentrated in RobotEra’s single large round. The remaining five sectors generated 97 deals and under $280M combined.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (11 deals)

Two rounds accounted for nearly all disclosed capital. Volant Aerotech closed what multiple Chinese financial outlets confirmed as the largest single round in Chinese passenger eVTOL history: over $300M, with a UAE fund (Stone) leading and Shanghai’s first city-level state capital entering. Cosmoleap closed a ¥500M (~$69M) Series A for its chopstick-catch reusable rocket (the same tower-arm booster recovery system SpaceX uses), covered by SpaceNews. The remaining nine deals are earlier stage, concentrated in urban air mobility, SAR satellite infrastructure, and UAV systems.

🤖 Robotics (19 deals)

SF Express both led RobotEra’s $200M+ strategic round and operates the company’s humanoid robots across 10+ logistics centers. The operator-as-investor structure, where the round lead is also the largest deployment partner, is defining which companies demonstrate commercial traction rather than commercial intent. LinkerBot extended its fundraising to seven rounds in 18 months after shipping 10,000+ dexterous hands. Wujie Power attracted a ¥500M (~$69M) overseas deployment contract from Envision alongside its raise, the largest overseas commercial contract signed by a Chinese embodied AI company to date. Botshare, a robot rental platform launched December 2025, completed its fourth round in 105 days.

🧠 AI (22 deals)

Creati.ai closed a $20M Series B for its Buzzy video editing product, which the company frames as “the world’s first AI Video Photoshop,” reporting $15M in ARR and 20 million+ global users. Spirit AI’s Series A+, a straggler from the April 24 batch with Alibaba as sole lead and a reported ¥5.5B (~$760M) valuation, rounds out the AI highlights. The remaining 20 AI deals are early-stage and mostly undisclosed.

🔬 Semiconductors (22 deals)

IDG Capital led a ¥500M (~$69M) Pre-Series A for Calculet at a reported ¥3B valuation, building AI processors on a chiplet architecture. With access to advanced monolithic nodes constrained by export controls, chiplet designs assembled from available process nodes are emerging as a structural workaround. The remaining 21 deals are early-stage and undisclosed.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (24 deals)

The highest deal count at 24, but only $49M disclosed. QingNa Technology raised ¥200M (~$28M) in a Series A for sodium-ion batteries, with one million large cylindrical cells shipped to European customers in January 2026 and five million contracted for the year. The remaining 23 deals are early-stage and mostly undisclosed.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (22 deals)

22 deals, almost entirely undisclosed. Cangzhou Four STARS Glass, a 33-year-old pharmaceutical glass maker, closed the only disclosed round at ¥300M (~$42M) Pre-IPO. The remaining deals are concentrated in industrial automation, precision testing, and manufacturing equipment suppliers, the enabling layer beneath the robotics and semiconductor sectors above it.

💡 Frontier Tech (8 deals)

TuringQ completed a Series B+ for photonic quantum computing, reaching an estimated ¥7B (~$970M) valuation on the strength of ¥100M+ (~$14M) in signed orders in H1 2025 and approaching ¥1B (~$138M) raised in 2026 alone. BCDTEK closed a Series A for silicon-based OLED microdisplays (the display technology inside the Apple Vision Pro) while building China’s first 12-inch silicon OLED fab.

Spotlight

Volant Aerotech (沃兰特航空)

Series C, over $300M (~¥2.16B)

The largest single round in Chinese passenger eVTOL history: UAE capital leads, Shanghai’s first city-level state investor enters, and the order book stands at over 1,900 aircraft.

Volant Aerotech is developing the VE25-100 (Tianxing), a six-seat eVTOL with a 2,500kg maximum takeoff weight and a 200-400km range. The pre-production prototype completed its rollout at the Zigong Aviation Industrial Park in Sichuan in May 2025. China Southern General Aviation signed the first confirmed commercial passenger eVTOL order in China in January 2025, for multiple aircraft at approximately ¥25M (~$3.5M) per unit, deposit paid.

The Series C, closed April 27 and led by Stone (UAE), sets a size record for Chinese passenger eVTOL confirmed by multiple Chinese financial outlets and the company’s English press release. Futen Capital (孚腾资本), backed by Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co. as its primary shareholder, entered the round in what reporting describes as the first direct investment by Shanghai city-level state capital in a crewed eVTOL OEM, a designation that carries implications for certification support, infrastructure investment, and public procurement. The accumulated order book now stands at over 1,900 aircraft worth more than ¥47.5B (~$6.6B), with confirmed deposits from China Southern General Aviation, Asian Express, and ABC Financial Leasing.

Founder Dong Ming spent over 20 years in civil aviation across AVIC, GE, Rockwell Collins, and Aviage Systems, with direct involvement in the ARJ21, C919, and CR929 programs.

Sequoia China, Futen Capital, Future Capital, and Legend Capital co-invest alongside Stone.

Announcement (Chinese) · Announcement (English)

RobotEra (星动纪元)

Strategic Investment, over $200M (~¥1.44B)

SF Express led the round and operates the robots across its own logistics network, the only deal this week where the lead investor is also the operator at production scale.

RobotEra builds full-stack humanoid robots with a stated goal of industrial deployment at scale. Its L7 stands 171cm, weighs 65-70kg depending on configuration, runs 55 degrees of freedom (the count of independent joint movements, a proxy for human-like dexterity), and reaches 4 m/s, among the fastest bipedal humanoids in production. Bimanual carry capacity is 20kg. The XHAND1 dexterous hand adds 12 degrees of freedom as a modular unit. RobotEra develops approximately 95% of its hardware in-house, including motors, sensors, and control systems, a prerequisite it argues for the cost reduction required at deployment scale.

SF Group, China’s largest integrated logistics company, led this round and simultaneously operates RobotEra robots across 10+ logistics centers spanning North, East, and South China. Deployed robots run at 85% of human worker efficiency in logistics environments. RobotEra shipped 600+ cumulative units as of CES 2026 in January and announced thousand-unit scale batch deliveries beginning Q2 2026. SF Express is running robots on its own production lines and backing the supplier with over $200M simultaneously.

Founder Chen Jianyu is an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, PhD from UC Berkeley under Masayoshi Tomizuka. Tsinghua University holds equity, described on the company website as unique among humanoid robotics companies.

Sequoia China, IDG Capital, and CICC co-invest alongside SF Group.

Announcement

Cosmoleap (大航跃迁)

Series A, ¥500M (~$69M)

Founded February 2024, Cosmoleap has raised approximately $83M in 18 months for a chopstick-catch reusable rocket, with SpaceNews coverage marking rare Western trade press attention for a Chinese launch startup at this stage.

Cosmoleap is developing the Leap-1A (跃迁一号甲), a 70-meter methane/liquid oxygen rocket targeting an 18-ton LEO payload capacity and first flight in 2027. The Qingyu-11 engines are rated for 50 reuses.

The company is testing a tower-catch booster recovery system (the same chopstick-arm architecture SpaceX uses with Mechazilla), with catch tower testing underway since November 2024. A nine-engine first stage burns liquid oxygen and methane.

This Series A, co-led by Houji Capital (厚纪资本) and Puhua Capital (普华资本) with Huaxing Capital as financial advisor, brings total capital raised to approximately $83M (¥100M (~$14M) seed in November 2024 plus ¥500M (~$69M) here) after 18 months of operation. SpaceNews covered the round directly, a level of Western trade press attention rare for a Chinese launch startup at Series A stage. Zhongguancun Development Group entered as a strategic investor.

Announcement

TuringQ (图灵量子)

Series B+, amount undisclosed

Photonic quantum computing with ¥100M+ in commercial orders, a national guidance fund entering directly, and an estimated valuation of ¥7B (~$970M).

TuringQ builds photonic quantum computers using a full integrated device manufacturer model, designing, fabricating, and commercializing its own chips while operating China’s first photonic chip pilot production line at the Wuxi Photonic Chip Research Institute. Two in-house photonic chip fabrication approaches enable a 2-3 week iteration cycle, fast for a hardware company running its own production line. Products are sold into financial services, quantum cryptography, and scientific computing customers including state-owned enterprises in energy and telecommunications.

The commercial trajectory matters: ¥500,000 (~$69K) in revenue in 2022, over ¥10M (~$1.4M) in 2023, and over ¥100M (~$14M) in signed orders in H1 2025. The 2025 World Internet Conference awarded TuringQ and SJTU’s Wuxi institute its Leading Technology Award, the first time the prize went to a quantum computing project. China’s quantum sector saw investment in Q1 2026 approach full-year 2025 levels, with TuringQ among the largest deals. This B+ is led by Zhangjiang Group (张江集团), Haiwan Capital (海望资本), and Guotou Chuanghe (国投创合, managing the Yangtze River Delta Fund under the National Venture Capital Guidance Fund). Total raised in 2026 alone is approaching ¥1B (~$138M). Estimated valuation: approximately ¥7B (~$970M) per deal trackers.

Founder Jin Xianmin is an assistant professor and 2021 Changjiang Scholar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He holds 150+ publications across Science, Nature Photonics, and Nature Communications and gave up UK residency after his postdoc at Oxford to return and found the company.

Announcement

Creati.ai (感知阶跃)

Series B, $20M (~¥144M)

A Chinese-founded AI video company launching Buzzy, which the company frames as “the world’s first AI Video Photoshop,” with $15M in ARR and 20 million global users.

Creati.ai launched as ZMO.AI in 2020 generating AI fashion product imagery for e-commerce. It relaunched as Creati in April 2024 with a broader AI content platform. This Series B is structured around the launch of Buzzy: a conversational video editing tool that makes localized edits to existing footage (removing background people, fixing eye contact, adjusting lighting, swapping products) without regenerating the full clip. The company positions Buzzy as “the world’s first AI Video Photoshop,” a deliberate framing against both Adobe and the generative-AI-replaces-everything narrative. It targets video creators and e-commerce merchants who need precise, reversible edits.

The commercial signals behind a $20M round: the company reports $15M in annual recurring revenue and 20 million+ global users. For a Chinese AI SaaS product with USD pricing and international distribution, those figures at this raise size represent one of the stronger commercial profiles in this week’s batch. Founder Ella Zhang (张诗莹) has run the company through both pivots. The prior Series A was led by Hillhouse with GGV Capital and GSR Ventures participating.

Redpoint leads. CCV (创世伙伴创投) co-invests.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

LinkerBot (灵心巧手)

Series B+, undisclosed

Seven rounds in 18 months. LinkerBot’s 42-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand has shipped over 10,000 units at a production rate of 4,000+ per month, with a reported valuation now above ¥15B (~$2.1B). Government capital (Zhongguancun Fund, Bank of China Asset Management) leads the B+ alongside commercial VCs, a composition that typically tracks procurement contract visibility rather than purely financial valuation.

Linkhou (灵猴机器人)

Series B+, hundreds of millions RMB

CIIF (中网投基金), China’s national industrial investment fund, led Linkhou’s Series B+ at a reported ¥3B (~$415M) valuation. Linkhou makes components for humanoid robots (perception systems, motors, and controllers) sold into multiple OEMs rather than competing at the system level. Silicon Valley R&D office. Revenue reportedly exceeding ¥200M (~$28M) from embodied AI orders. The picks-and-shovels position is defensible regardless of which humanoid OEM wins at scale.

Wujie Power (无界动力)

Angel, hundreds of millions RMB

Over $200M raised cumulatively at angel stage, ¥5B (~$695M) valuation, and a ¥500M (~$69M) overseas deployment contract signed with Envision for humanoid robots on European and Asian production lines. Envision, a clean energy and battery materials company backed by Chinese and Japanese capital, both led the investment and signed the deployment contract simultaneously, the same operator-as-investor structure as RobotEra and SF Express this week.

Calculet (原粒半导体)

Pre-Series A, ¥500M (~$69M)

IDG Capital led a ¥500M (~$69M) Pre-Series A for Calculet at a reported ¥3B valuation. Calculet builds AI processors on a chiplet architecture, modular standardized compute units assembled into custom configurations rather than monolithic designs that require advanced process nodes. Chiplets assembled from production-capable nodes avoid the export control constraints on equipment and advanced processes. Guoxin Science and Technology Innovation Fund (国新科创基金) co-invests alongside IDG and semiconductor-specialist VCs.

SEAHI Robotics (世航智能)

Series A+, undisclosed

Underwater robots for 0-10,000 meter depths. SEAHI‘s proprietary thrusters are rated for 10,000 operational hours versus a 300-400 hour industry standard, a 25-30x differential that is the company’s primary technical moat. GSR Ventures’ Zhu Xiaohu has invested across three consecutive rounds. Founded May 2023 by a team from Harbin Engineering University with operational deep-sea deployment experience. Simultaneous Series A+ and A++ rounds announced March 31, 2026.

Botshare (擎天租)

Pre-Series A, hundreds of millions RMB

A robot-as-a-service rental platform founded December 2025 that completed four rounds in 105 days. At ¥300,000 (~$42K) per humanoid robot, the purchase price is out of reach for most SME buyers; daily rental changes the access model. Charoen Pokphand’s robotics arm reportedly invested, bringing the Thai conglomerate’s manufacturing and food processing operations across Asia into both the investor and likely deployment picture. Reported valuation: ¥4.2B (~$580M).

Cangzhou Four STARS Glass (四星玻璃)

Pre-IPO, ¥300M (~$42M)

A 33-year-old borosilicate glass company closing a Pre-IPO round is the most unusual deal by company age in this week’s cohort. Sixing makes pharmaceutical packaging glass (vials, ampoules, syringes) using the cold-top all-electric Vello process, the same manufacturing approach as SCHOTT in Germany. Sixing is reportedly the only Chinese company operating this process at scale, and fourth globally. China’s healthcare supply chain localization push creates sustained demand for domestic alternatives to imported pharmaceutical packaging that can match the quality standard.

BCDTEK (芯视佳)

Series A, hundreds of millions RMB

Silicon-based OLED microdisplays for AR and VR, the display technology inside the Apple Vision Pro, currently dominated globally by Sony’s OLEDoS process. BCDTEK is constructing China’s first 12-inch silicon OLED fab. The combination of display technology (the bottleneck in high-end AR) and domestic fab capacity (the semiconductor sovereignty angle) makes this relevant to both the AR hardware market and China’s display independence agenda.

破壳机器人 (”Hatching Robot”)

Angel, tens of millions USD

Home service robots, founded by a Tsinghua professor, backed by Yunqi Capital (led), Shunwei Capital (Lei Jun’s fund), and Honghui Fund at a reported ¥2.6B (~$360M) valuation with no products shipped publicly. The valuation rests entirely on founder premium: Tsinghua credentials, high-profile investor names, and a large addressable market in home robotics.

Spirit AI (原力灵机)

Series A+, undisclosed

Spirit AI‘s Spirit v1.5 VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model ranked #1 on RoboChallenge, the global real-world robotics benchmark, outperforming Physical Intelligence’s π0.5. Moz1 humanoid robots are deployed on CATL’s Zhongzhou battery production line. Huaqin Technology (华勤技术), Yufu Holdings (渝富控股, Chongqing state capital), and Hengxu Capital (恒旭资本) led the Series A+. Total raised: approximately ¥3.3B (~$460M) across six rounds in 18 months. The “dirty data” training thesis (building robot intelligence from unstructured real-world data rather than curated clean datasets) is the contrarian technical bet underlying the benchmark performance.

QingNa Technology (青钠科技)

Series A, ¥200M (~$28M)

Sodium-ion batteries for industrial and grid applications. One million large cylindrical cells shipped to European customers in January 2026; five million contracted for the year, making QingNa the first Chinese sodium-ion startup to reach commercial-scale export to Europe.

Huaxi Aviation (华喜航空)

Seed, tens of millions RMB

A hydrogen-turbine hybrid eVTOL: hydrogen fuel cell plus turbine rather than battery-electric. Joby, Archer, Wisk, and Volant are all-electric; Huaxi is pursuing a different energy architecture. Hydrogen-turbine hybrids address the range and energy density limitations that battery-electric designs face at larger scale. Seed valuation is reported at ¥150M (~$21M).

The Bigger Picture

The Customer-Investor Loop

The three strongest robotics deals this week share the same structure: the company writing the largest check is also running the robots.

SF Express led the RobotEra round (detailed in the Spotlight above) and operates the company’s humanoid robots across its own logistics network. Envision led Wujie Power’s raise and signed a ¥500M (~$69M) overseas deployment contract in the same transaction. Botshare’s Pre-Series A brings in capital alongside a rental model that lowers the access barrier for SME buyers priced out of ¥300,000+ direct purchases.

The structure makes commercial sense at this stage of the technology. Humanoid robots are not yet at the cost and reliability level where a neutral financial investor can independently underwrite deployment risk. A major logistics operator, a battery materials manufacturer, or a manufacturing conglomerate has the operational environment, the data collection capacity, and the scale purchasing power to run a real robot program. The equity investment gives them preferred pricing, roadmap access, and upside if the company scales. The deployment contract gives the startup committed purchase volume, the hardest problem in early commercial robotics.

At this stage of the technology, commercial traction is better read from the lead investor’s operational relationship with the product than from valuation or benchmark position alone.

China’s Private Aerospace Week

China’s aerospace and commercial space sector raised ¥26.6B (~$3.81B) across 137 rounds in 2025, a record year. This week added $369M at the top.

Volant’s $300M is the largest round in Chinese passenger eVTOL history. The investor composition matters as much as the size: Futen Capital, backed by Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment Co., entered a crewed eVTOL OEM for the first time. Toyota’s $394M Series C investment in Joby Aviation in January 2020 established that a major industrial operator would commit strategic capital to the category; Futen’s entry serves the same function for Chinese eVTOL. Shanghai has publicly framed its ambition to become the world eVTOL capital, and Futen’s investment is the first direct capital commitment behind that public ambition.

CAAC’s eVTOL certification timeline (31 months versus 5-7 years in Western markets) is a structural advantage the capital markets are pricing in. With 1,900+ aircraft on Volant’s order book and Shanghai municipal state capital committed, the conditions for a national champion designation are visible.

Cosmoleap’s ¥500M (~$69M) Series A, covered by SpaceNews, is the launch side of the same story: a company founded February 2024 has raised approximately $83M in 18 months for a reusable rocket with tower-catch recovery. China’s private launch sector now has multiple companies at significant funding levels, with the gap to SpaceX-tier technology closing on the orbital reuse side.

Quantum Goes Commercial

China’s quantum sector saw investment in Q1 2026 approach full-year 2025 levels. TuringQ’s revenue trajectory (¥500,000 (~$69K) in 2022, ¥10M+ in 2023, ¥100M+ in signed orders in H1 2025) is the first genuine commercial curve to appear in photonic quantum computing. The 2025 World Internet Conference Leading Technology Award going to a quantum computing project for the first time is one signal; the national guidance fund entering directly is another.

The technology path TuringQ pursues, photonic chips operating as co-processors alongside classical systems at room temperature, sidesteps the cryogenic requirements that constrain superconducting quantum computers and puts early commercial applications within reach: financial risk modeling, materials simulation, and combinatorial optimization, problems where the solution space is too large for classical computers to search exhaustively. PsiQuantum, the most-funded photonic quantum company globally, has raised over $2B on the same architectural bet. TuringQ has reached ¥100M+ (~$14M) in customer orders at a fraction of that capital intensity, operating an integrated domestic chip production line.

The entrance of the National Venture Capital Guidance Fund’s Yangtze River Delta Fund into the B+ round is the policy signal that the commercial trajectory has been validated at the highest level. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan places quantum in the same “future industry” designation as semiconductors and AI. At this level of the state capital hierarchy, direct investment has historically preceded national champion designation in sectors from semiconductors to EVs. TuringQ is the first photonic quantum company in China to combine a national guidance fund investment, a ¥7B (~$970M) valuation, and a demonstrated ¥100M+ commercial order book.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

111 deals in seven days, $1,020M (~¥7.3B) in disclosed capital, and 95 of those 111 deals didn’t disclose. All the visible money concentrates in a handful of large rounds: robotics ($419M) and AI ($504M) collected 90% of the total while generating fewer than 40% of the deals. Semiconductors ran the highest deal count of any sector at 23, but almost none disclosed amounts, operating early-stage and quiet.

🤖 Robotics (18 deals)

Sudu Technology came in at a reported $2B+ valuation at 11 months old and demo stage; X Square Robot collected all four of China’s internet giants on a single cap table at ¥2B (~$278M) Series B. The bottom of the distribution is a long tail of ~$690K seed rounds for pre-product startups building everything from dexterous hands to explosion-proof industrial quadrupeds. The component layer sits between them: Motorevo shipped 100,000+ joint modules in 2025 and is still valued at ¥1.6B (~$222M). The stage distribution skews to the extremes, with large late-stage rounds and a long tail of sub-¥10M seeds, but few companies in between.

🧠 AI (24 deals)

EVAS closed the week’s largest AI round at ¥1.5B (~$208M) with four Beijing municipal funds co-leading simultaneously, one day after Beijing formally established the ¥20B (~$2.8B) four-fund structure that backed the round. Sunrise AI (曦望) extended its run to seven financing rounds in ~16 months, crossing ¥10B (~$1.4B) valuation as China’s first inference-GPU unicorn. Loopit’s $50M (~¥360M) round (Garena lead) follows the app reaching #1 on the global Google Play Entertainment chart.

🔬 Semiconductors (23 deals)

The highest deal count of any sector, but almost none disclosed. The sector’s early-stage density is running well ahead of its public capital story. Two companies warrant attention regardless: NanoLN (晶正电子) is raising Pre-IPO financing as the holder of approximately 78% of global lithium niobate thin-film wafer supply, a material foundational to 5G filters and photonic chips. Wendun Juxin (稳顿聚芯) shipped China’s first domestic high-precision compound-semiconductor stepper in September 2025 and is already profitable. Neither has significant English-language coverage.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (13 deals)

Zero disclosed capital across 13 deals. Sodium battery, flow battery, and advanced materials companies raising without announcing terms. Luquos Energy (易池新能, CUHK spinout) is the exception, a Hong Kong-registered flow battery company with international backing (Towngas + Gobi Partners) that chose to disclose.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (10 deals)

The National Strategic Emerging Industry Investment Fund (国调基金) made a strategic investment in Chang Guang Satellite that accounts for most of the sector’s visible capital, a state-capital substitute for the financial and foreign investors who exited after Chang Guang was placed on the US Treasury’s SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) sanctions list. FAW Group’s eVTOL spinout Qiyi Technology (旗翼科技) added the week’s largest angel-stage aerospace deal at ¥400M (~$55M).

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (20 deals) · 💡 Frontier Tech (3 deals)

Audfly (清听声学) stands out in Other Adv. Manufacturing with a Series B+ at ¥2B (~$278M), a directional audio company backed by Lenovo Ventures. Frontier Tech had just three deals: a synthetic biology Series A from PAML Biotechnologies (柏垠生物, Hillhouse-adjacent capital) and a fusion-wire JV from Juneng Superconducting (聚能超导).

Spotlight

EVAS (奕行智能)

Series B, ¥1.5B (~$208M)

China’s first reportedly mass-produced RISC-V AI chip, now backed by Beijing’s four-fund industrial apparatus.

EVAS makes AI chips built on RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture that carries no US intellectual property. Every Chinese chip company designing on Arm or x86 carries licensing risk: a single US policy change could cut access to the architecture itself. RISC-V removes that dependency entirely. EVAS’s Epoch series entered mass production in early 2025 for data center, internet, and automotive AI customers, reportedly making it the first Chinese company to ship RISC-V AI chips at scale. CEO Liu Hui (刘珲) is a semiconductor veteran from Socionext, STMicroelectronics, and Fujitsu.

The timing of this round is worth noting. Beijing formally launched a ¥20B (~$2.8B) four-fund structure on April 21. All four funds co-led EVAS’s Series B the next day. That sequencing was almost certainly pre-arranged, but the public choreography is the point: the government is signaling that RISC-V is the chosen path for compute independence, and converting that signal into capital allocation immediately. Eight Chinese ministries coordinated a national RISC-V push in 2025. If RISC-V AI chips reach performance parity with Arm-based alternatives, China’s entire inference stack could eventually run on architecture that no export control can touch. The investor line here is entirely government capital with no commercial VCs, which tells you Beijing is treating RISC-V compute as public infrastructure.

Four Beijing municipal funds co-led: the E-Town Industry Upgrade Fund (亦庄国投), the Beijing High-Precision Industries Development Fund, the Beijing Information Industries Fund, and the Beijing AI Industry Fund. And/Li Capital, Bolly Ventures, Sayi Industries Fund, Longjiang Fund, Qingtan Capital, and Jiukun Ventures participate.

Announcement

Sudu Technology (苏度科技)

New financing round, amount undisclosed, valuation reported at $2B+ (~¥14.4B+)

Eleven months old, demo-stage, and reportedly valued above $2 billion (~¥14.4B), the most extreme pre-revenue ratio in this week’s cohort.

Sudu Technology builds what it calls a universal embodied AI platform: a “robot brain” that uses 3D world models with reinforcement learning to handle manipulation tasks involving transparent, reflective, and flexible objects, categories where most robotic vision systems still fail. Picking up a glass, folding a towel, handling a bag of chips without crushing it. These are trivially easy for humans but remain unsolved at scale in robotics because the objects deform, reflect, or transmit light in ways that break standard computer vision. Sudu’s approach trains its system to build a 3D understanding of the world and learn through trial and error rather than following pre-programmed routines. Its flagship Sudo R1 has been demonstrated in 60-minute unedited real-world testing footage released publicly. CEO Han Zheng (韩铮) co-founded the company in May 2025. The company is 11 months old.

Chief Technical Advisor Su Hao (苏昊) is the credentialing anchor for the valuation. He co-created ImageNet in 2009 with Fei-Fei Li at Stanford, the massive labeled image database that effectively launched modern deep learning. Before ImageNet, AI systems struggled to reliably distinguish a cat from a dog; by giving researchers millions of labeled images to train on, the project enabled the breakthroughs in computer vision that now power everything from autonomous driving to facial recognition. Su also pioneered PointNet, the foundational architecture for processing 3D point cloud data, which is how robots understand spatial environments. He concurrently leads Fudan University’s Institute of General Physical Intelligence. The investor bet is that embodied AI could follow a similar path from academic foundation to commercial platform, and that whoever controls the software layer of the robot stack controls the platform.

The investor line reflects that bet across sectors: CATL positioning for the robot power stack, Alibaba, Tencent, and Ant Group as platform companies that would distribute robots through their ecosystems, and IDG, Hillhouse, and China Life as financial conviction. Whether $2B for a demo-stage product is early-stage pricing for a future platform or the clearest evidence of capital running ahead of commercial reality is the open question. The amount raised in this round has not been publicly disclosed.

CATL, Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Group, IDG Capital, Hillhouse, China Life Equity, BlueRun Ventures, Futen Capital (孚腾资本), Digital Future (数字未来), Fudan Innovation (复旦科创), and Yunhui Capital (云晖资本). Financial advisor: Gaogul Capital (高鹄资本).

Announcement

X Square Robot (自变量机器人)

Series B, ¥2B (~$278M) @ ¥12B (~$1.67B) val

Humanoid robot butlers deployed in Chinese homes, and the first time all four of China’s internet giants are on one cap table.

X Square Robot builds general-purpose humanoid robots on its proprietary WALL-A foundation model, a unified architecture processing vision, language, touch, and motion through a single system. The Quanta X2 humanoid stands 172cm with a 6kg payload per arm. In March 2026, the company launched a commercial home-cleaning service via 58 Daojia, China’s largest home services platform, making it the first Chinese company to deploy humanoid robots into homes at commercial scale. The company also unveiled WALL-B, a home-environment AI model, the same week as this round closed. Founded December 2023, it has raised nine rounds totalling over ¥3B (~$417M) in under two and a half years.

ByteDance, Meituan, Alibaba, and Xiaomi are now simultaneously on the cap table, the first time China’s four largest internet platforms have co-invested in the same embodied AI company. Each came in at a different round: Meituan led the Series A in May 2025 as sole investor; Alibaba Cloud co-led the A+ in September; ByteDance co-led the A++ in January 2026; Xiaomi co-leads this B. In the 2015 bike-sharing era, these same companies funded competing startups against each other. Here they are all on the same cap table, which is either a sign of X Square’s dominance or a sign that each platform wants guaranteed access to whatever the home robot deployment layer becomes. Each brings different distribution: Xiaomi’s consumer hardware retail, Meituan’s home services network, Alibaba’s cloud and logistics, ByteDance’s content discovery.

Sequoia China and Xiaomi Strategic Investment co-lead. ByteDance, Meituan, Alibaba Cloud.

Announcement

Loopit (涌跃智能)

Third round in 2026, $50M (~¥360M)

Global #1 on Google Play Entertainment, $50M from Garena, and a distribution play into Southeast Asia.

Loopit is an AI interactive content platform. Users type a prompt and the app generates a rich mobile experience combining images, audio, video, and 3D elements that responds to the phone’s sensors (microphone, gyroscope, camera) in real time. Instead of scrolling past a video, you’re inside it, tilting your phone to explore, speaking to change the scene. CEO Chen Weipeng (陈炜鹏) co-founded and led the large-model team at Baichuan AI, previously building products at Sogou and Soul. The app launched in February 2026, hit #1 in the Google Play Entertainment category globally and #8 overall within two months, and in February Elon Musk reposted a user-generated Loopit video on X.

A Chinese consumer AI app reaching #1 globally on Google Play is still rare (TikTok remains the only real precedent at that scale), and that traction is what brought Garena to the table. Sea Group’s gaming arm operates across Southeast Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan) in markets where Loopit’s interactive content format travels naturally among mobile-first, gaming-native users. Garena gets a position in the content format before Instagram Reels or TikTok can copy the interactivity layer; Loopit gets SE Asia distribution that a Beijing startup would take years to build independently. Chen built the large language model team at Baichuan AI (one of China’s leading foundation model companies), which suggests the AI generation engine underneath is purpose-built rather than an API wrapper around someone else’s model.

Garena (lead), Jingwei China (经纬中国, fourth check into the company), BlueRun Ventures, Yingce Capital (渶策资本), Bairui Capital (柏睿资本). Financial advisor: Gaogul Capital (高鹄资本).

Announcement

Chang Guang Satellite (长光卫星)

Strategic investment, hundreds of millions RMB, valuation ~¥16B (~$2.2B)

The US Treasury listed it as a sanctioned entity. China’s sovereign development fund just became its anchor investor.

Chang Guang Satellite operates the Jilin-1 constellation, the world’s largest sub-meter resolution commercial remote sensing satellite constellation, with 144–152 satellites in orbit delivering optical imagery to government, enterprise, and international customers. The company was founded in 2014 as a spinout from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, and had been building toward a STAR Market IPO since a 2022 filing. In December 2023, the US Treasury placed it on the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) sanctions list for selling satellite imagery to Wagner Group proxy entities, covering Ukrainian battlefields and Wagner’s operational areas in Africa. Foreign investors exited. The IPO was withdrawn in late 2024

In January 2026, Chang Guang re-filed for a STAR Market IPO under new rules that extend the exchange’s fifth listing standard to commercial aerospace companies, removing strict profit requirements for companies whose value is in technology rather than current earnings. This week, the National Strategic Emerging Industry Investment Fund (国调基金), managed by China Chengtong, one of two state-owned capital operating companies that deploy sovereign investment on behalf of the State Council, completed a strategic Pre-IPO investment at a valuation reported by deal databases at around ¥16B (~$2.2B). The capital the SDN designation drove away, foreign investors and commercial VCs with compliance exposure, has been replaced by a sovereign fund whose mandate is national strategic interest rather than financial return.

National Strategic Emerging Industry Investment Fund (国调基金), managed by Chengtong Fund Management under China Chengtong Holdings (中国诚通).

Announcement

NanoLN (晶正电子)

Pre-IPO round, amount undisclosed

The company that holds approximately 78% of global lithium niobate thin-film wafer supply is heading for a public listing.

NanoLN makes lithium niobate thin-film (LNOI) and lithium tantalate thin-film (LTOI) wafers. These are nanometer-thick crystalline films that manipulate light and radio signals, and they sit inside a surprising range of critical hardware: the RF filters in every 5G base station, the electro-optic modulators that move data through fiber optic connections in AI data centers, LiDAR ranging systems, and quantum communication devices. Founded in 2010 in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province on China’s east coast by returnee entrepreneur Hu Wen, NanoLN was the first company globally to achieve industrialized production of these films and the first to produce 8-inch LNOI wafers. Huawei Hubble is an early investor. The company serves 200+ customers across China, the US, Japan, and Europe.

NanoLN holds approximately 78% of global LNOI wafer supply per Yole (2023Q3), with the remainder split between NTT Advanced Technology and SCIOCS (both Japan). That near-monopoly feeds two accelerating demand curves: 5G infrastructure buildout and AI data center photonics, where the optical interconnects between GPU clusters increasingly rely on LNOI-based modulators. In practice, a significant share of the world’s 5G filters and data center photonic links depend on wafers from a single Chinese company, a supply chain concentration comparable to TSMC’s position in advanced logic chips, though at a much earlier stage of geopolitical visibility. The Pre-IPO round is the step before a listing that will ask Chinese capital markets to price a deep-tech materials monopolist with a global customer base for the first time.

Leading Investment, Shandong Expressway, Jiantou Investment, and reportedly 10 additional investors.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

• Motorevo (泉智博) — A+ round, hundreds of millions RMB @ ¥1.6B (~$222M) val
  100,000+ joint actuator modules (the motorized joints that make robot limbs move) shipped in 2025 to MIT, Tencent RoboticsX, Leju Robotics, and Peking University. Building million-unit annual capacity online now. At ¥1.6B (~$222M) valuation for a company with institutional customers and real revenue, it trades at a fraction of the multiple applied to software-first humanoid peers.
  Investors: Shenzhen Investment Holdings leads.
  Announcement

• Pudu Robotics (普渡机器人) — New round, approximately ¥1B (~$139M) @ ¥10B (~$1.4B) val
  120,000 commercial service robots across 80+ countries, 23% global market share, 100% revenue growth in 2025. First disclosed raise in three years; opened a Dallas headquarters the same week. A three-year fundraising gap followed by ¥1B and a US headquarters in the same week points to IPO preparation, not growth financing.
  Investors: Longgang Financial Holdings and Asia Investment Capital co-lead.

• FAW Qiyi Technology (旗翼科技) — Angel round, ¥400M (~$55M) @ ¥2B (~$278M) val
  China’s largest angel-stage eVTOL investment. FAW Group’s Tier-1 suppliers Fu’ao Auto Parts (thermal management) and Fuwei Auto Components (interiors) each invested ¥150M (~$21M) to lock in parts contracts before the aircraft finishes development. These are ICE-era automotive suppliers using equity to secure roles in the eVTOL supply chain before the commercial market exists, the same pattern that played out in EVs a decade ago.
  Investors: FAW Group, Fu’ao Auto Parts, Fuwei Auto Components, Cornerstone Capital.

• Sunrise AI (曦望) — Strategic round, ¥1B+ (~$139M+) @ ¥10B+ (~$1.4B+) val
  SenseTime’s inference GPU spinoff closes its seventh financing in ~16 months, crossing ¥10B (~$1.4B) valuation. S3 chip targets 90% cost reduction and 300%+ performance gain per token, a ¥0.01 (~$0.0014) per million token price floor for inference compute in China. 150 total engineers; capital-efficient by the standards of peers with 3–5x the headcount.
  Investors: Hangzhou Capital leads; Puhua Capital co-invests.

• Juwei Technology (具微科技) — A+ round, hundreds of millions RMB @ ¥1.8B (~$250M) val
  Fourth financing round in approximately two months. Builds explosion-proof wheeled quadruped robots for hazardous industrial environments, China’s first combined explosion-proof and increased-safety certification. Every lead investor (Weiqiao Group, Binhua Chemical, Binzhou SOE) operates the exact facilities the robot is designed to enter, effectively locking in anchor deployments before the product ships at scale.
  Investors: Binzhou SOE Investment, Weiqiao Group, Binhua Chemical co-lead.

• CheeChips (奇世智能) — Angel round, tens of millions RMB
  Silicon Valley-incorporated (Mountain View HQ) with a Shenzhen global R&D center, targeting a 59-product AI-powered maternal and infant care platform. The company structure and roadmap are designed for international distribution from inception.

• Xteink (阅星曈) — Series A, tens of millions RMB (Shunwei + Jingwei + Xiaohongshu)
  Ultra-portable e-ink smartphone attachment with 2M+ global users before this institutional round. Xiaomi’s Shunwei Capital, Jingwei China, and Xiaohongshu join as investors, three platforms with overlapping consumer demographics and distribution value.
  Investors: Shunwei Capital, Jingwei China, Xiaohongshu.

• Wendun Juxin (稳顶聚芯) — Strategic investment @ ¥500M (~$69M) val
  China’s first domestic high-precision stepper (the lithography machine that prints circuit patterns onto wafers) for compound semiconductors like gallium nitride and silicon carbide, the wide-bandgap materials used in EV power electronics, 5G, and renewable energy. Shipping since September 2025 against Nikon and Canon incumbents. Projected ¥140M (~$19M) revenue for 2025 at roughly 32% net margin, profitable in its first year of shipment. Listed company Sudaweige (300331.SZ) already holds equity; the stock hit limit-up on the machine’s launch announcement.
  Investors: Yigao Capital leads; Sudaweige (300331.SZ) confirmed strategic shareholder.

• Audfly (清听声学) — Series B+, hundreds of millions RMB @ ¥2B (~$278M) val
  Parametric speaker tech that focuses sound into a directional beam, backed by Lenovo Ventures. Directional audio has no dominant commercial-scale incumbent, which puts OEM integration into consumer hardware as the likely route to scale.
  Investors: Lenovo Ventures leads; Suchang Capital, Sugao Xinjin Holdings, and others follow.

• Luquos Energy (易池新能) — Pre-A, hundreds of millions RMB
  Hong Kong-registered CUHK spinout building sulfur-iodine flow batteries, a type of large-scale energy storage where liquid electrolytes are pumped through cells, at 2x the energy density of the vanadium redox systems that currently dominate the market. Utility-scale storage targeting Southeast Asia, backed by Towngas (00003.HK) for strategic distribution and Gobi Partners for regional reach. The sulfur-iodine chemistry differentiates from vanadium incumbents, and the SE Asia focus avoids China’s crowded domestic storage market.
  Investors: Oriza Holdings and Wuxi Guolian Xizhou Fund co-lead; Towngas (00003.HK) strategic; Gobi Partners.

Stragglers

• 萝博派对 (RoboParty) — Angel, amount undisclosed @ ~$4.5M (~¥32.5M) val
  A small humanoid robot startup where the investors matter more than the amount. Shunwei Capital (Xiaomi’s fund) and Xiaomi co-invest, making this Xiaomi’s third robotics placement in a single week (leading X Square’s ¥2B Series B, backing RoboParty at angel, joining Xteink’s consumer AI hardware Series A). Xiaomi doesn’t place three hardware bets at Series B, angel, and Series A in a single week by accident. The spread from foundation-model humanoid to pre-product startup to consumer AI device looks like deliberate stack coverage.

The Bigger Picture

Why China’s Giants Are Backing the Same Robots

X Square Robot now has ByteDance, Meituan, Alibaba, and Xiaomi on a single cap table, the end state of a systematic accumulation across four rounds from May 2025 to April 2026. Sudu Technology closed a round this week at a reported $2B+ valuation, backed simultaneously by CATL, Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Group, IDG, Hillhouse, and China Life.

The logic has inverted from the shared-bike era of 2015–2016, when Alibaba and Tencent hedged across rivals, each backing different companies to ensure platform presence regardless of outcome. This week, multiple giants co-own the same company, concentrating upside rather than spreading risk. If whoever controls the robot “brain” layer controls the platform, the rational move is to own the leading candidate outright before commercial scale makes that position expensive to acquire.

The Sudu round is the stress-test of that logic taken to its limit. A company that was incorporated in May 2025 has attracted China’s most credentialed institutional investors simultaneously, at a price that values it above most Series C enterprise software companies with real revenue. Chief Technical Advisor Su Hao (苏昊) co-created ImageNet in 2009 and pioneered PointNet at Stanford, and his academic pedigree seeds the thesis that Sudu could do for robot manipulation what ImageNet did for computer vision. Either that analogy holds and $2B (~¥14.4B) underprices the eventual platform, or it doesn’t and the week’s robotics valuations are the clearest current evidence of capital running ahead of commercial reality.

X Square B round via 36kr · Sudu announcement via TMTPost · US/China humanoid valuation divergence via CNBC

Beijing’s Compute Bet Gets Coordinated

On April 21, 2026, Pedaily reported that Beijing’s Economic-Technological Development Area was formally establishing four new industrial guidance funds with a combined scale of ¥20B (~$2.8B). The four funds (covering integrated circuits and AI, robotics, biotech, and future industries) are jointly capitalized by the district’s fiscal budget and E-Town Capital (亦庄国投) as LP. On April 22, EVAS announced a ¥1.5B (~$208M) Series B led by all four of those funds simultaneously.

Beijing’s four-fund quartet didn’t evaluate EVAS and happen to co-invest. The round was the first deployed capital from a structure announced the previous day. The target is RISC-V AI chips. Arm and x86 carry US intellectual property; chip companies designing on them remain exposed to licensing dependencies that export controls can sever. RISC-V is royalty-free and carries no US IP. Eight Chinese government ministries coordinated a national RISC-V adoption push in 2025; EVAS becoming reportedly the first domestic company to mass-produce on the architecture is what Beijing’s capital apparatus is backing.

The compute coordination runs wider than EVAS. CXMT, China’s only domestic DRAM producer, took a 3.7% equity stake in AI inference chip startup AiJie Core (艾捷科芯) this week, acquiring it for ¥150M (~$21M). CXMT is targeting HBM3 production by end-2026, and an equity position in a downstream compute startup creates an anchor customer and co-development relationship before the memory market opens. Inference GPU unicorn Sunrise AI (曦望) simultaneously closed its seventh round in ~16 months at ¥10B (~$1.4B) valuation, led by Hangzhou state capital.

Three AI compute plays in one week, all with state-adjacent capital at the center. Taken together (fund structure announced April 21, EVAS round April 22, CXMT stake confirmed, Sunrise AI round closed), they show state capital coordinating across the compute stack simultaneously: RISC-V as the architecture, CXMT building the memory-plus-logic vertical, and inference efficiency as the commercial application layer.

Beijing four-fund structure via Pedaily · EVAS round via National Business Daily · RISC-V China policy via TrendForce

That’s it for this week. More next week.

Inclusion AI built a model for the agent economy, where thousands of tasks run in loops, every output token costs money, and the model that wastes the least wins. Very few labs optimize for intelligence per output token, despite it being one of the most important metrics in agentic AI. We ran tests against two comparable open-source models. Ling was the only one to complete all of them.

The Token Explosion

OpenRouter processed 20.6 trillion tokens just last week.

That’s roughly 2.4 million complete works of Shakespeare.

Per day.

The driver isn’t chatbots. It’s agents. Anthropic’s own data: agents use roughly 4x more tokens than chat interactions. Multi-agent systems use 15x. Platforms like OpenClaw are running tasks around the clock. As Anand Iyer of Canonical VC put it: “The demand for AI inference right now is coming from agentic platforms, especially OpenClaw.”

At this volume, every wasted token is real money. Claude Sonnet 4.6 alone processed 1.38 trillion tokens last week on OpenRouter. The OpenRouter State of AI report puts average prompt tokens at 6,000 per request versus 400 for completions, a 15:1 input-to-output ratio. Applied to Sonnet’s traffic, that works out to roughly $5.2M at list price ($3/M input, $15/M output) across one platform in seven days.

The Overthinking Problem

The industry’s answer to “make it better” has been “make it bigger.” The result: top models now use tens of millions to hundreds of millions of output tokens to complete the same evaluation on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The arms race has been chasing intelligence scores while ignoring what it costs to get them.

Users have noticed. “Caveman prompting” strips grammar from inputs to force shorter outputs. The instruction prompt: “Speak primitive. Use nouns and verbs. No grammar filler. Save tokens.” A formalized Claude Code skill built around the technique has 14,000 GitHub stars. Its README written in the style it teaches: “Brain still big. Cost go down forever. One rock. That it.” Across real dev tasks, it cuts output tokens by 65%. It works for coding. It breaks on anything that requires sustained reasoning.

At the corporate level, the opposite problem: tokenmaxxing. Companies began tracking employee token consumption as a productivity metric. Workers compete on internal leaderboards ranked by tokens burned, with the highest individual user averaging 281 billion tokens. Volume confused for value.

The instinct isn’t limited to prompt engineering. Marc Andreessen recently called a YouTuber with “a hundred videos on retardmaxxing” his “new life coach.” The philosophy: go to work, do a good job, come home. Don’t overthink it. Chamath Palihapitiya said the same on All-In: “Enjoy your life, work hard, and don’t overthink it.”

Caveman prompting is the demand-side version of this: users forcing models to stop overproducing. But the hack reduces cost without reducing waste. A model that produces fewer tokens because it reasons more efficiently is a different proposition from one that’s been told to shut up. What if a model just didn’t overproduce by design?

The Intelligence Yield Thesis

“Bigger is better” has peaked. The new competition is fewer active parameters, faster inference, lower cost per completed task.

Mixture-of-Experts architectures route each token to a small subset of the total parameters. What matters is how many fire per token, not how many exist. Linear attention scales computation linearly instead of quadratically, an advantage that compounds as outputs get longer.

The focus should be on outcome per token.

Ant Group and Ling-2.6-flash

Ant Group’s dedicated AGI lab was launched in February 2025, inspired by DeepSeek’s research model. Their stated vision: “AGI as humanity’s shared milestone, not a privileged asset.”

Ant Group’s DNA is financial inclusion: 140 million healthcare users on AQ, 60% from cities where specialist care barely exists; 1.69 million farmers with satellite-assessed, collateral-free loans processed in minutes. Chairman Eric Jing calls it “inclusive AI.”

Ling-2.6-flash is in our opinion one of the models on the Pareto frontier of the Intelligence Yield Thesis. (We’re also big fans of Minimax M2.7, which leads in a different quadrant).

The architecture: 104 billion total parameters, 7.4 billion active per token. MoE with 256 expert modules. Hybrid Linear Attention + Multi-head Latent Attention with linear time complexity, where the advantage grows at longer outputs. Multi-Token Prediction for parallel inference.

The efficiency: 15 million output tokens to complete the full Artificial Analysis eval. The comparison models used 5-7x more.

Before anyone knew who made it, Ling launched on OpenRouter as “Elephant Alpha.” Topped the trending charts. Hit 100 billion daily token calls. Top 8 by total calls on the platform. Without brand or marketing, the model proved itself.

First, some context on benchmark results before we dive into the tests (images from artificialanalysis.ai).

The Benchmarks

Token use

Nemotron used 110 million output tokens to complete the standardized AA Intelligence Index. GPT-OSS used 78 million. Ling used 15 million. That’s 86% fewer tokens than Nemotron and 81% fewer than GPT-OSS.

Cost

Multiply by price per token. Ling: $23. GPT-OSS: $67. Nemotron: $145.

Model Pricing

Cheap per-token pricing doesn’t guarantee cheaper outcomes. GPT-OSS charges 2x more per output token than Ling ($0.60 vs $0.30) and uses 5x more output tokens. Factor in input costs and the total comes to $67 vs $23 for the same evaluation.

Intelligence

This is the chart where Ling looks weakest. Intelligence score: 26, against GPT-OSS’s 33 and Nemotron’s 36.

The benchmark results call to mind a quote by someone who knew a thing or two about intelligence.

The AA Intelligence Index measures general reasoning, knowledge, and math. It does not measure sustained execution in loops, tool use across hundreds of steps, or the ability to finish what it starts. In testing, Ling was the only model that did.

Let the Tokens Do the Talking

Three tests, run through Claude Code: qualitative analysis, bug fixing, and visual code generation. Ling against two open-source models in the same weight class: Nemotron-3-Super-120B (12B active), Inclusion AI’s own published benchmark rival, and GPT-OSS-120B, OpenAI’s open-source entry. Same prompts, same tools, same environment. Every token tracked.

Qualitative Analysis

For this test we wanted to check qualitative verbal reasoning in addition to simple tool calling. Each model was given a one-paragraph brief and asked to grab the latest news and produce a vibe check on today’s tech: sources, an overall vibe read, companies vibing and not vibing, and a one-paragraph synthesis. Take a position, back it with reasoning, and convey it in an output file, blind-scored by Gemini 3.1 Pro on voice, judgment, and second-order thinking.

• Ling 2.6 Flash: 18/50: Finished in 2,579 tokens, 50.7 seconds. Hedged every observation, described the surface without reading beneath it.

• GPT-OSS-120B: 21/50: Similar tone. Generic vibe call, headline-obvious picks. Gemini flagged both for consultant-speak. Better discipline score kept it three points ahead.

• Nemotron 3 Super: Did Not Finish (DNF): Never started. Couldn’t parse the setup step and emitted garbled Python-serialized output instead of clean bash. Repeated the same broken command 11 times, mid-loop it ran echo and pwd successfully, proving basic bash execution was fine, then immediately returned to the broken pattern. Same serialization bug that surfaced in all three tests. 4,145 tokens spent, nothing produced.

Bug Fixing

Ten programs from QuixBugs: classic algorithm implementations, each with exactly one introduced bug. The task: find the bug, fix it, pass the tests.

• Ling 2.6 Flash: 10/10: Fixed all ten. On knapsack, a large input triggered a test harness timeout. Ling identified the performance constraint and refactored iterative DP to recursive with @lru_cache, going beyond the one-line fix to make the algorithm pass within the test harness timeout.

• Nemotron 3 Super: 5/10, DNF: A serialization bug appeared across all three tests: instead of clean code output, the model produced Python-serialized data structures. It worked around this for the first five programs. On Levenshtein distance, the bug triggered an infinite loop it never escaped.

• GPT-OSS-120B: 5/10, DNF: Fixed every program it attempted (gcd, flatten, mergesort, quicksort, find_in_sorted), all correct on first try. Then stopped. After program five, it output a summary of remaining tasks and quit. We relaunched it to confirm: same result. No error, loop, or technical failure, it simply didn’t sustain the task.

Visual Code Generation

Breakout game, single-file HTML. One prompt, no follow-ups.

• Ling 2.6 Flash: Functional: 503 lines. Glow effects, particle physics, working game mechanics. No debugging, no reconstruction, no workarounds. Played immediately.

• GPT-OSS-120B: Broken on delivery: 294 lines. The game logic was there (paddle, ball, bricks, collision, particles) but it didn’t work out of the box: the start screen overlay blocked click events from reaching the canvas, so the game couldn’t actually be started without a code fix. Simpler than Ling’s output: flat-colored bricks, minimal effects, smaller canvas. Same mid-task stall as the other two tests: froze mid-generation, required prompting to continue.

• Nemotron 3 Super: Broken: Same serialization bug as in the bug-fixing test. Produced Python-serialized data instead of HTML. The game logic was there but was buried inside a model-level format failure that affected all three tests. We reconstructed it from the raw output; the logic held up pretty well once extracted. Though there were layout bugs.

The Results

Across all three tests, Ling was the only model to complete every task without intervention. The competition failed in different ways: Nemotron’s serialization bug blocked it in every test. OSS was competent when working (every bug fix correct) but stalled mid-run across all three tests, each time requiring a prompt to continue, and its visual output didn’t work without a code fix. Completion and token efficiency moved together.

A model that uses fewer tokens per step can sustain more steps before losing coherence. The same design discipline that cuts token waste also cuts task abandonment. The tradeoff showed in qualitative analysis, where Ling scored lowest: a model trained to minimize output tokens will hedge rather than elaborate, summarize rather than argue. The same discipline that makes it fast at execution makes it flat on opinion.

The AA Intelligence Index doesn’t test what agents actually do. The benchmarks that do tell a different story. BFCL-V4 measures function calling accuracy: Ling 67.04, GPT-OSS 43.3, Nemotron 35.12. TAU2-Telecom measures multi-step task completion: Ling 93.86, Nemotron 62.94, GPT-OSS 41.45. SWE-bench Verified: Ling 62.00, Nemotron 61.00, GPT-OSS 43.80. MRCR long-context: Ling 54.01, Nemotron 39.04. Ling leads on agentic benchmarks across the board. It trails Nemotron on hard math (AIME 73.80 vs 88.59).

Different tool for a different job.

Why This Is Important

Andrej Karpathy’s autoresearch makes this concrete. A coding agent autonomously improves a training script in a loop: read, hypothesize, edit, run, evaluate, repeat. Unattended. Karpathy ran it for two days: 700 experiments, 20 discovered optimizations, 11% training speedup. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tried it overnight: 37 experiments, +19%.

Each cycle: roughly 18,000 tokens at about $0.10. At 700 cycles, the gap between an efficient model and a verbose one is the gap between a $70 run and a $700 run.

The same pattern applies everywhere agents run in loops: CI pipelines, code review, data monitoring, agent swarms. The emerging architectures don’t use one model for everything. Frontier models like Kimi K2.6 and Claude Sonnet are strong at complex reasoning and high-stakes decisions. But running them on every sub-task in a multi-agent pipeline is expensive by design. Kimi K2.6 at $0.75/$3.50 per million tokens, Claude Sonnet at $3/$15. Efficient models handle execution-layer throughput at a fraction of the cost.

A swarm running hundreds of sub-tasks needs each sub-agent to be reliable, cheap, and disciplined, not the smartest model available. At $0.10/$0.30 versus $3/$15, that choice determines whether a pipeline is economically viable at scale.

The cost floor dropping changes what’s possible. Always-on agents that monitor, iterate, and improve without human intervention. A researcher annotating genomic data in a continuous loop. A solo developer running hundreds of test variations overnight. A clinic in a mid-tier city running diagnostic pipelines on a budget that would not have supported it a year ago. The compute and models exist. The constraint has been a reliable model with good cost per token at volume.

Ling at $0.10/$0.30, open-source, designed to minimize waste. That’s the financial inclusion bet applied to intelligence itself.

20.6 trillion tokens last week. The agent economy is here. Efficiency is the core driver. Inclusion AI is building for it.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

102 deals from April 10 to 17. $1.63 billion (~¥11.7B) in disclosed capital across 27 of them — the other 75 went undisclosed. Robotics commanded $937 million (~¥6.75B) of that, across 23 deals. This week, though, the more interesting pattern runs underneath the headline numbers: listed companies and OEM customers are entering venture rounds not as passive financial investors but as strategic acquirers, buying equity positions in their key suppliers before commercial volumes arrive.

🤖 Robotics (23 deals)

它石智航 (TARS Robotics) closed a $455 million (~¥32.8亿) Pre-A, reportedly the largest private embodied AI raise in Chinese history, with Hillhouse, HongShan, and Meituan co-leading 14 months after founding. The stage distribution across the batch forms a barbell: eight angel and Pre-A rounds ran alongside five B+ or strategic rounds, with almost nothing in between.

🧠 AI (17 deals)

The bulk of the disclosed capital — ¥5亿+ (~$70M+) — went into one company: 智象未来 (HiDream.ai), which released an MIT-licensed open-source image model before closing this round. The broader batch skews early, with Anhui, Hefei, and Beijing municipal capital prominent as co-investors.

🔬 Semiconductors (23 deals)

The sector’s headline event was not a venture round. 盛合晶微 (SJ Semiconductor, 688820.SH) listed on the STAR Market 2,700 times oversubscribed, reaching a ¥360亿 (~$5B) market cap at issue, with ¥47.79亿 (~$664M) in net proceeds. As the #1 domestic 12-inch chip bumping provider and holder of 85% share in mainland 2.5D advanced packaging, it controls a chokepoint that every Chinese AI chip designer needs to reach production. Among the private rounds, 芯擎科技 closed a B+ at approximately $100 million (~¥720M) for its automotive cockpit chip platform, pulling in Yutong Bus (600066.SH) as a strategic co-investor, extending the company’s addressable market beyond passenger EVs.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (14 deals)

A quieter week for the sector. 疆海科技 (Zendure), which sells energy storage hardware across 63 countries and counts Europe and North America as its primary markets, raised a round led by domestic strategic investors. 顺铉新材, a specialty polyimide film producer with export relationships into South Korea, Japan, the US, and Russia, closed a materials round. Neither disclosed amounts.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (9 deals)

边界智控 (Boundary.AI) closed a B-round for its eVTOL flight control systems — the only Chinese company to have cleared CAAC’s SOI#1 airworthiness review for eVTOL-specific FCS. The rest of the batch was light: several pre-A rounds for drone platforms and satellite sensor startups, mostly undisclosed.

⚙️ Other Advanced Manufacturing (12 deals)

Mixed batch with no standout cluster. 锐能科技 raised a B-round with 菱电电控 (688667.SH) acquiring 30% as a strategic lead. Several other industrial automation plays closed early-stage rounds with regional government funds, consistent with the ongoing manufacturing digitization push in non-coastal provinces.

💡 Frontier Tech (4 deals)

量旋科技 (SpinQ) — announced April 3, flagged in this week’s straggler batch — sells superconducting quantum computers commercially into 200+ institutions across 40+ countries and raised ¥6亿 (~$83M) in a C+, several months after closing its C-round, bringing the combined C-series total to approximately ¥10亿 (~$139M). The company is profitable and building out a pre-IPO syndicate with Guotai Junan Innovation and Chengdu state capital as new investors. NovaFusionX (诺瓦聚变) appears in this week’s data with its ¥7亿 (~$97M) 天使+ round but was covered in last week’s issue; refer to that report for the full analysis.

Spotlight

TARS Robotics (它石智航)

Pre-A, $455M (~¥32.8亿), valuation ¥120.58亿 (~$1.67B)

Humanoid robotics, 14 months old, betting against the VLA consensus.

TARS Robotics builds humanoid robots for industrial precision tasks — specifically the kinds of fine-motor assembly work that previous robot generations couldn’t reliably handle. The company’s A1 robot set a Guinness World Record in December 2025 for most wire harness insertions by a robot in an hour (105 valid sub-millimeter completions), a benchmark designed to prove capability for CATL-style battery assembly lines; the company was founded in February 2025.

The technology bet is explicit. TARS is building against the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model orthodoxy that most Chinese and US humanoid companies are pursuing, arguing that large cross-embodiment models borrowed from language AI (”外来和尚” — literally “the foreign monk always chants best,” the Chinese idiom for assuming outside expertise is inherently superior) can’t deliver reliable industrial performance. Instead, TARS runs AWE3.0 (AI World Engine), a proprietary architecture with three components: OSD for panoramic sensorimotor decision-making, HTS for high-density tactile sensing, and LAS for smooth latent-space motion generation. The architecture debate has no settled answer, and TARS is the largest private bet on the non-VLA side.

Investors: Hillhouse (co-lead), HongShan (co-lead), Meituan (co-lead), Qiming Venture Partners (returning), and 15+ additional investors including Beijing municipal funds and state capital. The “$455M Pre-A = largest embodied AI private raise in Chinese history” claim is reported by multiple independent Chinese financial outlets and is unchallenged by competing data — treat it as plausible rather than certified.

Announcement

HiDream.ai (智象未来)

New financing round, ¥5亿+ (~$70M+)

MIT-licensed image model, Q1 revenue already above full-year 2025.

HiDream.ai is a multimodal AI company that builds image generation models and related enterprise tools. Its HiDream-I1 — a 17-billion-parameter model released under an MIT license — scored at the top of HPSv2.1 benchmark testing across all four style categories (animation, concept art, painting, photo) ahead of Flux.1-dev, Stable Cascade, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney V6, per the company’s own technical benchmarking. The company says Q1 2026 revenue exceeded its full-year 2025 figure, with over 30 million registered professional users and 40,000+ enterprise clients including Huawei Cloud and TikTok Shop. Those are company-stated figures, not independently audited.

HiDream released a frontier model for free, built a global developer user base, and used that credibility to close institutional capital at a scale that enterprise SaaS revenue alone wouldn’t support at this stage. The same open-source-to-capital sequence runs across several companies in this batch — more on that in The Bigger Picture.

Founder Mei Tao was VP at JD.com and Senior Research Manager at Microsoft Research Asia; he is a foreign academician of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. The round brought in Oriental Rich Capital as a new investor alongside a state capital stack from Anhui and Hefei: Anhui Venture Capital, Hefei Industrial Investment, Hefei High-Tech Investment, and the Anhui Provincial AI Fund. Prior investors, including Anhui state capital from the previous A-round, are continuing. The round was described by media as a “new financing round” — no Series letter confirmed in the primary announcement.

Announcement

Link Touch (蓝点触控)

C+, 数亿人民币 (hundreds of millions of RMB)

72.6% humanoid six-axis force sensor market share. Customers are now shareholders.

Link Touch makes six-axis force/torque sensors and joint torque sensors for humanoid robots, with a 72.6% share of the humanoid six-axis force sensor market as of Q3 2025, according to GGII industry research. The company has doubled its revenue every year for three consecutive years, is on a confirmed IPO track per the CEO’s statement, and has shipped over 100,000 units. The C+ round came approximately five months after the November 2025 C-round led by HongShan — the company has now raised a new round three times in under a year.

The investor composition tells the supply chain story more clearly than any market share figure. The C+ brought in CATL (via its CVC arm Puquan Capital), AgiBot, and Galaxy General Robotics as new co-investors — the latter two being two of Link Touch’s largest humanoid robot customers. Two customers converted to shareholders in the same transaction, locking in supply alignment before humanoid volumes actually arrive. Autoptic and Galaxy Yuanhui rounded out the round. The structure echoes what Huawei did with semiconductor suppliers between 2019 and 2022: equity plus procurement logic, with the supplier gaining committed demand and the customer securing component access.

The valuation was not disclosed in any primary announcement.

Investors: CATL (via Puquan Capital), AgiBot, Galaxy General Robotics, Autoptic, Galaxy Yuanhui.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

极佳视界 (GigaAI) — Series B1, ¥15亿 (~$208M), ¥120亿 (~$1.67B) val. ¥25亿 (~$347M) raised in 30 days: ¥10亿 (~$139M) Pre-B in March, then this B1 in April. The company claims GigaWorld-1 ranks at the top of the WorldArena live leaderboard above Google and NVIDIA models — note that the published WorldArena paper (February 2026) evaluated GigaWorld-0, which did not place first; the #1 claim refers to a subsequent live-leaderboard submission. The Maker H01 humanoid is targeting 1,000 units in 2026. Huawei Habo invested in the A1-round; the B1 added state funds from Wuhan, Guiyang, Shandong, and Shanghai alongside an unnamed tech giant as strategic.

• PsiBot (灵初智能) — Series A, undisclosed, ¥90亿 (~$1.25B) val. Embodied intelligence company whose Psi-R2 manipulation model tops the MolmoSpace benchmark — an Allen Institute for AI robotics evaluation platform — above Physical Intelligence and other international teams, per QbitAI reporting. SDIC Pioneer (national-level industrial fund) and a Beijing municipal fund co-led the A-round; Hillhouse was the angel. A ¥90亿 valuation on an undisclosed amount, in a government-anchored round, is the investor composition doing the talking.

• BOTINKIT (不停科技) — B+/B++ combined ~$50M (~¥360M), ¥19.5亿 (~$271M) val. AI kitchen robots deployed across 29 countries at Disneyland, Jollibee, Walmart, Rewe, Foodstuffs, and LSG Sky Chefs (Lufthansa catering). The most internationally distributed robotics company in this batch, and one of the least covered in Western tech media. Investors include ZeroOne Ventures and Genesis Capital, with SSC Capital as FA. HKUST robotics faculty (Li Zexiang, Gao Bingqiang, Gan Jie) remain on the cap table from the angel round.

• Sand.ai — B-round, reportedly ~$50M (~¥360M). Sub-30 people, $10M+ ARR reported. CEO Cao Yue is the lead author of Swin Transformer (ICCV 2021 Best Paper, 30,000+ citations). The company open-sourced MAGI-1, its video generation model.

• SiEngine (芯擎科技) — Series B+, ~$100M (~¥720M), ¥32.5亿 (~$451M) val. The DragonEagle-1 (龙鹰一号) is a 7nm automotive cockpit SoC (TSMC-fabbed), #1 domestic automotive cockpit chip by 2024 shipments with 1M+ units shipped and ASIL-D certification. Yutong Bus (600066.SH) joined as strategic co-investor, extending the addressable market beyond passenger EVs. Jingming Capital led.

• Xingyun IC (行云集成电路) — Pre-A, ¥4亿 (~$56M), ¥20亿 (~$278M) val. LLM inference-first GPU with CUDA compatibility, targeting AI server mass production in 2026. Tsinghua founders (CEO Ji Yu), Zhipu AI as angel strategic investor, 5Y Capital and Primavera Capital co-leading the Pre-A. The post-DeepSeek inference demand story (where local GPU alternatives become competitive precisely on inference cost rather than training throughput) makes this the most coherent domestic GPU pitch in the current batch.

• Boundary.AI (边界智控) — Series B, over ¥100M (~$14M+), ¥5亿 (~$69M) val. The only Chinese eVTOL-specific flight control company to clear CAAC’s SOI#1 airworthiness review, with a triple-redundant dual-channel architecture meeting DO-178C/DO-254/DO-160G compliance — the certification stack that maps to FAA/EASA requirements. That’s the regulatory moat for any non-Chinese eVTOL program needing a redundant FCS supplier. Customers include several Chinese eVTOL manufacturers. Xiamen Jianfa (Xiamen SOE) and Zhangjiang Group (Shanghai science park) co-invested, reflecting geographic positioning across two low-altitude economy pilot zones.

• Simple AI (深朴智能) — Pre-A, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥20亿 (~$278M) val. General-purpose embodied AI humanoid targeting home, hotel, and eldercare environments. Linear Capital and Puhua Capital co-led, with Shunwei Capital (Lei Jun / Xiaomi’s venture fund) participating as a strategic investor. Chief Scientist Wang Jiawei is ex-MSRA, ex-DeepSeek, and ex-ByteDance Seed with 10,000+ Scholar citations; Product VP Zhang Di brings 10+ years in robotics and 100,000+ units shipped. The Xiaomi ecosystem extending a bet on home humanoids without building in-house.

• EncoSmart (享刻智能) — Series A, ¥1.5亿 (~$21M), ¥7.5亿 (~$104M) val. Commercial kitchen robots for fried chicken shop back-kitchens via its LAVA multi-task embodied operation system. Ninebot/Segway (689009.SH) acquired approximately 20% as strategic lead, contributing supply chain manufacturing access, platform technology, and distribution channels alongside the capital — not a passive financial stake. YiBo Capital acted as FA.

The Bigger Picture

Open code, closed rounds: how Chinese AI labs turned open-source into a capital strategy

HiDream released HiDream-I1 under an MIT license, built 30 million users on it (per company figures), and closed what Anhui and Hefei state capital joined as a major financing round on the strength of that user base. Q1 2026 revenue already exceeded the full year of 2025.

This is the same sequence running across several companies in this week’s batch. 极佳视界 (GigaAI) released GigaBrain-0.1 to Hugging Face (16,000+ downloads in two weeks), positioned it as the baseline for the CVPR 2026 GigaBrain Challenge, and is closing a ¥15亿 (~$208M) B1-round while targeting 1,000 Maker H01 humanoid units this year. 灵初智能 (PsiBot) published Psi-R2 as a manipulation foundation model before its A-round — both investors and the benchmark community evaluated the model before the company raised. Sand.ai open-sourced MAGI-1 while running $10M+ ARR on enterprise video generation. CEO Cao Yue’s authorship of Swin Transformer — an ICCV Best Paper with 30,000+ citations — is part of the credibility stack that precedes the round, not a credential that appears afterward.

The pattern is not the same as 2023-era open-source gestures, when Chinese labs published models partly to signal parity with US counterparts. In 2026, releasing a frontier model is functioning as a distribution mechanism: it acquires global developer users before products exist and converts that user base into institutional funding at valuation multiples that pure enterprise software can’t reach at comparable revenue stages. The model is the top-of-funnel, and the round is the conversion event. As MIT Technology Review documented in February 2026, Chinese labs from Alibaba Qwen to MiniMax have made open-weight releases central to their global positioning, with Qwen already overtaking Meta’s Llama in HuggingFace downloads. The same logic now runs inside robotics and embodied AI rounds.

The structural context for why this works: the Stanford AI Index 2026 found the Arena Leaderboard gap between the top US and top Chinese model had closed from roughly 300 points in May 2023 to 39 points — 2.7% — by March 2026, with DeepSeek-R1 briefly matching the leading US model in February 2025. China produced 30 notable AI models in 2025, holds 74.2% of global AI patents granted in 2024, and accounts for 20.6% of global AI research citations. Open-source distribution only works as a capital formation strategy if the models are good enough to earn genuine global adoption. The data says they are.

One complication worth naming: the benchmark claims are not all equally clean. HiDream’s HPSv2.1 result comes from the company’s own technical paper — applying the HPSv2.1 scoring model to a comparison set they selected. On Artificial Analysis, an independent aggregator, HiDream-I1 ranked second in April 2026. GigaWorld-1’s WorldArena #1 claim refers to a self-submission on the live leaderboard; the published WorldArena paper (February 2026) evaluated GigaWorld-0, which did not place first. PsiBot’s Psi-R2 MolmoSpace ranking is confirmed by QbitAI reporting and is the cleanest of the three claims. The pattern holds; some of the evidence supporting it is more self-reported than independent.

Customers becoming shareholders

Five deals this week share a structure: a listed company or OEM customer takes a direct equity stake in a key supplier, typically with commercial commitments bundled into the transaction. OneRobotics (06600.HK) acquired 21% of HITBOT — China’s #1 robot dexterous hand company by 2025 shipments — for ¥2.41亿 (~$33M) in a deal implying a ¥11.46亿 (~$159M) total valuation, which represents strategic pricing rather than market rate for a sector leader. Ninebot/Segway (689009.SH) led EncoSmart’s A-round with a strategic equity position, contributing supply chain access alongside capital. Link Touch’s C+ converted AgiBot and Galaxy General — two of its largest humanoid customers — directly into co-investors alongside CATL’s CVC. Lincontrol (688667.SH) acquired 30% of RNTECH, and Yutong Bus (600066.SH) joined SiEngine’s B+ as a strategic co-investor, expanding the automotive chip company’s exposure to commercial vehicles.

The clearest historical precedent is Huawei’s Habo investment program, which between 2019 and 2022 built equity stakes in approximately 40 semiconductor suppliers using a product-plus-orders-plus-capital model: equity paired with procurement commitments, at below-market valuations, creating strategic lock-in before demand outpaced supply. Several Habo portfolio companies saw Huawei account for 70–90% of their revenue post-investment, which turned out to be a structural vulnerability when Huawei’s own position came under pressure. The robotics version of this pattern is more distributed, with no single OEM running it: Ninebot, Yutong, OneRobotics, CATL, and Lincontrol each making independent moves with the same underlying logic — buy supply chain security before commercial volumes make those positions expensive to acquire.

Some of this week’s strategic commitments may involve circular logic. Where the customer-investor is also the company’s primary revenue source and the investment is structured to validate a valuation that pure financial investors wouldn’t support, the “strategic validation” can be self-referential. The cleaner cases — Ninebot’s platform and channel commitments to a commercial kitchen robot company, CATL’s material interest in sensor supply for humanoid assembly — are ones where the strategic rationale exists independently of the deal structure. The sector is producing enough volume now to tell those cases apart.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Looking around, most tables had people on their phones. Not scrolling social media. Trading. Stock tickers, candlestick charts, portfolio dashboards. An older woman two tables over was comparing notes with her friend on a position they both held. A younger guy in a polo shirt was toggling between a brokerage app and what looked like a crypto wallet. They all had smiles on their faces after riding the stock bump since FTSE Russell confirmed Vietnam’s upgrade from frontier to emerging market in its April 2026 review.

Most of the people in that coffee shop probably couldn’t tell you what FTSE Russell is. It doesn’t matter. Trillions of dollars in passive funds are benchmarked to FTSE’s indices: index ETFs, pension funds, sovereign wealth allocations. When Vietnam moves from frontier to emerging market, those funds are required to buy Vietnamese equities to maintain their index weighting. Active managers follow, chasing the inflows. The retail investors caught the front of an institutional wave.

After my coffee, my new friend Trung Pham (Gavin) and I hopped on a scooter for a short ride along the riverfront north to his office at the new International Financial Centre, Da Nang. It was here that Da Nang’s government-licensed regulatory sandbox had recently approved Vietnam’s first pilot for converting USDT to Vietnamese dong (VND). The country already has a massive retail investor base trading equities, crypto, everything. The IFC is the government’s bet that it can build new financial infrastructure on top of that energy.

I’ve been in China over a decade. I went to Vietnam to test a specific hypothesis: that the country would be following a pattern similar to China’s, where infrastructure and regulation get built simultaneously, and fast. What I found was even more impressive than the China parallel I had in mind. Vietnam already has full, open internet. Its IFC operates a specialized court with common law principles and English-language proceedings (it even has international judges), and is closer to Dubai’s DIFC than to anything in mainland Asia, borrowing selectively from the best jurisdictions globally and building something distinctly its own.

Vietnam is borrowing selectively from the best jurisdictions globally and building something distinctly its own.

The Financial Laboratory

Gavin works at the Da Nang Fintech Lab (DFL), the government-licensed regulatory sandbox operator sitting inside VIFC-DN, Vietnam’s International Financial Centre in Da Nang. The -DN designation is to distinguish it from its sister organization in Ho Chi Minh City.

DFL holds the actual regulatory rails and the API infrastructure (banking, e-wallet integration, KYC/AML stack) that lets ventures land and operate inside the sandbox. It even provides funding to startups in the sandbox.

Gavin is also an entrepreneur and the leading case study. His team is building a crypto accounting platform that does deep transaction-level tracing across inputs and outputs, producing compliance-ready reports. That kind of tooling matters because of what’s sitting just offshore.

Bringing $220 Billion Home

Vietnam recorded over $220 billion in crypto asset flows in 2025, up 55% year-on-year. Some 21 million adults hold or have used crypto, and Chainalysis ranks the country fourth or fifth globally in adoption.

Almost all of that activity happens on offshore exchanges, outside Vietnamese regulation, untaxed and unsupervised. The government wants to bring it onshore, and it has been moving fast at the national level.

The Politburo’s Resolution 57 (December 2024) named digital transformation a national strategic priority. The Law on Digital Technology Industry followed in June 2025, passed 441 to 4, covering semiconductors, AI, and digital assets in a single framework. A five-year crypto sandbox launched in September with plans for five licensed domestic exchanges, and the Ministry of Finance began accepting applications in January 2026 with a minimum capital requirement north of $400 million. OKX and HashKey jointly invested in a Vietnamese entity earlier this month to meet the bar, though foreign ownership is capped at 49%, keeping control local. The IFC is where much of this gets built.

The Tokenization Opportunity

Once the exchanges are licensed and the capital comes onshore, the question becomes: what does it invest in? Not just trading crypto back and forth. Regulated infrastructure makes tokenization viable: representing real-world assets (bonds, equities, fund units) on-chain. A retail investor buys a fractional slice of a government bond for a few hundred dollars instead of needing a brokerage account and a high minimum. Equities trade 24/7 instead of within exchange hours. Fund units settle instantly instead of T+2. Compliance rules get embedded in the token itself, so KYC and transfer restrictions travel with the asset.

Globally, this is already moving fast. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, a tokenized money market product issued through Securitize, holds over $2 billion in assets. JP Morgan’s Kinexys platform has completed tokenized Treasury trades with Ondo Finance and Chainlink, and bought $100 million in tokenized commercial debt from Singapore’s OCBC. The SEC issued a joint taxonomy of tokenized securities in January 2026, and US banking regulators published guidance on capital treatment the following month. McKinsey projects $2 to 4 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. BCG puts the bull case at $16 trillion. Closer to Vietnam, Singapore’s MAS has 40-plus financial institutions in its Project Guardian tokenization program and is testing tokenized government bills for interbank lending. Thailand issued a 5 billion baht tokenized government bond for infrastructure investment.

Vietnam has something most of these jurisdictions don’t: a large, active retail base, a government writing the rules in real time, and a sandbox where new financial products can be tested under license. People are already building for it.

Cathal Donnellan, a fellow Irishman who has spent years building crypto and fintech platforms across Southeast Asia, put it simply in a conversation we had before the trip: the old speculation model is, thankfully, mostly dead, and the future is real-world assets. He’s now driving asset tokenization in Vietnam with NexStox.

Gavin’s compliance platform, already operating inside the sandbox, is built for exactly this kind of market. Tokenized assets need transaction-level tracing and compliance-ready reporting baked into the infrastructure, not bolted on after the fact. The fact that DFL and VIFC have ventures building real products inside a sandbox that barely existed a year ago suggests the model is working as designed: stand up the infrastructure, and the builders show up.

Ten years from now, the retail investor sitting in that Highlands Coffee won’t just be trading stocks and crypto on separate apps. They may hold tokenized government bonds, fractional fund units, and international securities in a single wallet, settled on-chain, regulated onshore.

A Tale of Two Cities

The IFC itself operates as a dual-hub model, formalized in Decree 323/2025. Rich McClellan, CEO of VIFC-HCMC and Vice Chair of the Da Nang hub, walked me through the structure before my trip. Rich’s side of the house focuses on traditional capital markets, corporate finance, and asset management, and he’s been landing partners fast. Nasdaq is one of seven founding members alongside VinaCapital, Sovico Group, and others. HDBank and the London Stock Exchange signed a partnership in April 2026 for cross-border fundraising, connecting Vietnamese issuers with global institutional investors. Rich’s team also launched an Asia-Pacific Aviation Financial Hub at the Singapore Airshow with Airbus and Boeing as strategic members, targeting $6.1 billion in initial capital mobilization. HCMC climbed 11 places to 84th in the GFCI 39 rankings and was named one of 15 centres likely to become more significant.

VIFC-DN handles the experimental side: fintech, digital assets, trade finance, specialized lending, and new exchange models. I only had time to visit Da Nang this trip, so that’s where most of this piece is focused, but the two hubs are complementary.

The VIFC-DN sandbox can issue licenses for up to five years through its own executive authorities, not national regulators. Ventures can test things inside Da Nang that would be blocked anywhere else in the country. The first project through the door, Basal Pay, runs a controlled USDT-to-VND conversion under a non-custodial model on a 36-month pilot. Tether signed an MoU with Da Nang’s People’s Committee in November 2025 to support blockchain-enabled governance, digital asset policy, and tokenization of real-world assets. Corporate tax inside the IFC is capped at 10% for up to 30 years, half Vietnam’s standard rate.

This follows the path Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) carved starting in 2022. VARA didn’t try to squeeze crypto into existing securities or banking law. It built a new framework around what was already happening. Vietnam is applying the same logic to a much larger market.

The Industrial Base

Chips Next Door to Fintech

Right next door to DFL inside Da Nang’s IFC, VSAP Lab is building a $69 million chip packaging technology facility in Da Nang Software Park. Construction runs through Q4 2026, with capacity for 10 million semiconductor products annually and a 50-year operational license.

Chip packaging is where individual chips get assembled, stacked, and connected into finished products. VSAP Lab is targeting advanced packaging (fan-out, 2.5D, and 3D), the same technology used to build AI accelerators like NVIDIA’s H100. Vietnam already has serious semiconductor assembly investment from multinationals: Amkor is building a $1.6 billion plant in Bac Ninh, Hana Micron has committed around $930 million. But virtually all of that is conventional packaging. VSAP Lab would be the first domestically-led facility attempting advanced packaging, and advanced packaging is increasingly the bottleneck for global AI chip supply. Vietnam’s share of global assembly, test, and packaging is projected to rise from roughly 1% in 2022 to 8-9% by 2032.

The same Law on Digital Technology Industry that created the digital assets framework also covers semiconductors and AI. Da Nang is assembling financial infrastructure, semiconductor capacity, and regulatory sandboxes in the same district. That concentration is deliberate, and it’s the kind of stacking that compounds.

The Factory Floor

The IFC and the sandbox are the financial layer, and Vietnam’s industrial policy treats them as part of a larger stack. The four Politburo resolutions issued since August 2024, covering tech self-reliance, international integration, legal reform, and private sector development, are a coordinated push to move the country up value chains.

Samsung produces roughly half of all Galaxy smartphones in Vietnam, spread across factories in Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen provinces. Intel’s largest chip assembly and test facility globally sits in Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam’s electronics exports overtook garments as the country’s top export to the US for the first time in 2025.

Disbursed FDI hit $27.6 billion in 2025, a five-year high, with 81.7% of newly registered capital flowing into manufacturing and processing. Q1 2026 registered FDI surged 42.9% year-on-year to $15.2 billion. Singapore and China were the top two sources of new investment. China hitting number two is worth pausing on: Chinese manufacturers are doing their own China+1, moving production lines into Vietnam to diversify supply chains and hedge against trade friction.

The tariff situation almost put the kibosh on the whole plan. On April 2, 2026, the White House announced a 46% reciprocal tariff on Vietnamese goods. General Secretary To Lam called Trump directly and offered zero-for-zero tariffs. A 90-day pause followed, and negotiations are ongoing. Where the final rate lands is the single biggest near-term variable for Vietnam’s export-oriented manufacturing. But the rest of the industrial buildout (chip packaging, financial infrastructure, rail) isn’t waiting on that answer, and some of it exists precisely because the world is diversifying away from China, not toward it.

A $75 Billion Rail Network

On April 12, Vingroup’s VinSpeed broke ground on Vietnam’s first high-speed rail line, the $5.6 billion Hanoi-Quang Ninh route, 120 kilometers at 350 km/h using Siemens Velaro Novo trains, cutting travel time to 33 minutes by 2028. The line stitches together the Red River Delta’s industrial spine: Hanoi, Bac Ninh (where Samsung’s factories sit), Haiphong port, and Ha Long Bay, collapsing a 2-hour drive into a commute and opening a major tourism corridor at the same time.

It’s also explicitly designed as a pilot for the national network: Vietnam is using this line to build the operational experience before tackling the $67 billion North-South HSR approved by the National Assembly in November 2024, which is also moving into construction. Separately, in February 2025, the National Assembly approved an $8 billion rail link to China: 427 kilometers connecting the border at Lao Cai to Hanoi, Haiphong, and Ha Long City, targeting completion between 2026 and 2030. During Xi Jinping’s state visit in April 2025, the two countries agreed on feasibility studies for two additional intermodal railways, from Guangxi to Hanoi and from Shenzhen to Haiphong, with China funding the research phase.

High-speed rail restructured where capital, talent, and industry clustered inside China over the past two decades. Cities that were too far from economic centers to compete became viable manufacturing and service hubs almost overnight. Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou were always nearby, but HSR turned them into the Yangtze River Delta megaregion. The same thing happened with Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the Greater Bay Area, and Beijing and Tianjin in Jing-Jin-Ji. The same dynamic is available on the China-Vietnam corridor. A functioning HSR link between the two countries would do for cross-border economic integration what China’s domestic network did for its internal geography.

But there are limits to what government-led investment can build.

Fresh Ideas and Spoiled Food

Vietnam has gaps at every layer of the stack, and the biggest ones aren’t in regulation or capital. They’re cultural and structural. Coincidentally, conversations about agriculture showed the clearest examples of both.

The Fruit Nobody Brands

The government can build chip plants, lay rail, and write sandbox rules. What it can’t do is manufacture entrepreneurial instinct. Trung’s view on Vietnamese entrepreneurship was blunt. Most Vietnamese, he said, are raised with an employee mindset. The few who go entrepreneurial tend to chase quick cash.

His example was fruit. Take Vietnamese tropical fruit, dry it, cut it, brand it, and the price quadruples. Almost nobody does it. I pushed back: why doesn’t someone just import the processing machines from China and start capturing that margin locally?

Chinese entrepreneurs, he said, have a more scientific approach to business: doing deep market research, finding what specific areas produce what, and have decades more experience building supply chains. They pull raw inputs into China, process them domestically, and control distribution from there. Vietnamese operators trying to capture that value-add locally are competing against that experience gap. For now, most keep shipping raw product.

What Rots Before It Ships

This isn’t limited to fruit. Across the Mekong Delta’s perishables, the same gap appears at every stage. The delta produces roughly 24 million tons of rice annually; post-harvest losses from harvest to milling run 12 to 14 percent, over $600 million in lost value each year. For fruit and vegetables, losses reach 35 to 45 percent, mostly from bruising during transport and the absence of on-site cold storage. Seafood loses 15 to 20 percent of its value if it isn’t processed and frozen within hours of harvest. Nationally, food losses total 8.8 million tons a year, around $3.9 billion, roughly 12 percent of Vietnam’s agricultural GDP.

None of this is exotic to fix. Cold storage between farm and processor, basic processing capacity, a brand on the output. The gaps are real and the fixes are known. Vietnam has the volume; what it doesn’t yet have is capital and operators willing to deploy it.

Conclusion: The Concrete is Still Wet

Vietnam is not the next China. No country is. But after a week in Da Nang, I think it’s the most interesting place in Southeast Asia to be building right now. The people I met there aren’t waiting for the framework to be finished. Gavin is building compliance rails inside the sandbox, the DFL team is operating actual regulatory infrastructure, the VSAP Lab team is putting semiconductor capacity next door. They’re building alongside the framework, not after it.

None of this is guaranteed. HSR programs blow budgets, the grid hasn’t been tested at data center scale, and the sandbox is months old. But Vietnam broke ground on high-speed rail on April 12, its financial sandbox approved its first crypto conversion pilot four months ago, and FTSE Russell just confirmed the emerging market upgrade. That’s a lot of momentum landing in the same window.

What I’m Watching

Vietnam as Southeast Asia’s fintech sandbox. This is the big one. Vietnam has 21 million crypto holders, a government writing regulation around activity rather than ahead of it, and a sandbox where ventures can test products under license that would be blocked anywhere else in the country. Singapore’s framework is more mature, but Vietnam’s domestic market is twenty times larger and the cost of building there is a fraction. If the sandbox model works, and the early signs suggest it does, Vietnam could be where you build and test fintech products before scaling them across ASEAN’s 700 million people.

Institutional digital asset products. Once the exchanges are licensed and the capital comes onshore, the infrastructure is there for tokenized bonds, equities, and fund units to trade on regulated rails. The IFC’s common law court and English-language proceedings make it viable for cross-border products: a Vietnamese investor buying tokenized international bonds, or foreign capital accessing tokenized Vietnamese government debt. One interesting experiment further out: Vietnam doesn’t have freehold property. All land is leased from the state under time-bound use rights, 50 years for commercial, up to 70 for residential. Those rights are standardized, time-limited, and already in a government registry. Fractional tokenized land use rights could make one of Vietnam’s largest asset classes tradeable without requiring a change in property law.

Private infrastructure. The government is building rail, semiconductor parks, and financial architecture. What’s missing is the boring stuff in between: cold storage near farms, processing capacity near source, logistics that don’t destroy a third of the product before it reaches a buyer. None of this needs a sandbox or a license. It needs capital willing to build warehouses instead of apps.

Vietnamese brands. Vietnam exports volume. The margin goes elsewhere. Agriculture is the starkest example, but the gap applies more broadly. The entrepreneurial shift Trung described, from employee mindset to building something, is what turns a country that grows and assembles into one that sells finished products under its own name. The government can’t manufacture that. It either emerges or it doesn’t.

In closing, Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France in 1945, quoting Jefferson as he did it. Today, his bust overlooks a fintech sandbox running common law courts in English, licensing crypto exchanges, and writing the rules for tokenized securities. Eighty years from independence to a fintech sandbox with common law courts.

Not bad.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

103 funding events across seven sectors. Over $1.4 billion (~¥10.1B) in disclosed capital, with the real total significantly higher given that 50+ deals went undisclosed. Alibaba led a ¥2 billion (~$293M) strategic round into video generation platform Shengshu (Vidu). Nova Fusion raised ¥700 million (~$97M) at angel+ stage for nuclear fusion, on top of a ¥500 million angel round last year. Jack Ma and Lei Jun made their first known co-investment in Spirit AI, a humanoid robot company now valued at ¥15 billion (~$2.1B).

Chart note: Light-shaded bars represent conservative estimates where only a vague range (e.g., “数亿人民币” / “hundreds of millions”) was reported.

🤖 Robotics (16 deals)

Fewer deals than last week’s 27, but the individual rounds run larger. Spirit AI (千寻智能) pulled in ¥1 billion (~$139M) for an A+ round, part of two rounds totalling ¥3 billion (~$417M) within 30 days. ENGINEAI (众擎机器人) closed $200 million (~¥1.44B) with Luxshare as strategic co-lead. D-Robotics (地瓜机器人) raised $150 million (~¥1.08B) for its robot OS platform, a Horizon Robotics spinout building the infrastructure layer for humanoid development. The early-stage pipeline remains active: five angel/seed rounds, including a Li Auto AI team spinout (斜跃智能) founded just two months ago.

🧠 AI (17 deals)

Alibaba led a ¥2 billion (~$293 million) strategic round into Shengshu Technology (生数科技), maker of the Vidu video generation platform. That single deal accounts for most of the sector’s disclosed capital. The distribution otherwise skews early: Synapx (章鱼动力), founded December 2025 by four ex-Horizon Robotics executives, raised hundreds of millions at a ¥3 billion (~$417M) angel valuation for “physical AGI.” Red Bear AI (红熊AI) closed Series A with ¥135 million (~$19M) in revenue and 13% margins, one of the few profitable Chinese AI agent companies at this stage. ModelBest (面壁智能) hit E-round unicorn status for edge-side foundation models.

🔬 Semiconductors (14 deals)

Deals span analog and mixed-signal IC, MEMS sensors, power semiconductors, and storage chips. Most rounds are Series A or earlier with government guidance fund participation, consistent with the ongoing self-sufficiency push. Lingdong Jiaxin (灵动佳芯) closed an A round backed by SMIC Capital (中芯聚源) and others.

⚡ New Energy & Materials (19 deals)

Zhide Battery (致德新能源) raised ¥600 million (~$83M) at Series E for silicon-carbon anode materials, with CATL as an existing investor. JNION (珈钠能源) appeared for the second consecutive week, raising an A+ round for sodium-ion cathode materials with EVE Energy (亿纬锂能) backing. New materials companies (安迈特科技 with Toray strategic, 环西汀新材, 方硕材料, 启烯材料) accounted for roughly a third of the sub-sector.

🚀 Aerospace & Defense (5 deals)

Spacety (天仪研究院) raised ¥1.3 billion (~$181M) in a pre-IPO round for its 28-satellite SAR constellation, the sub-sector’s standout. Dezhihangchuang (德知航创) closed an A+ round with Sichuan provincial defense-industry funds. Huanyuhaoxing (寰宇昊行) and Gongda Satellite (工大卫星) filled out a quiet but steady week for space and defense.

⚙️ Other Adv. Manufacturing (22 deals)

Optoelectronics and photonics accounted for roughly ten deals, including Aochuang Photonics (奥创光子) at Series D and Saifulesi (赛富乐斯) raising ¥300 million (~$42M) for micro-LED. Three deals covered the lithium niobate photonics value chain from substrate to chip design. The remainder spans industrial automation, precision control, smart manufacturing equipment, and a tail of companies where names alone do not reveal the sub-sector.

💡 Frontier Tech (10 deals)

Ten deals, with capital concentrated in a few large rounds. Nova Fusion (诺瓦聚变) leads the category with a ¥700 million (~$97M) angel+ round for FRC nuclear fusion targeting AI data center power. Four to five brain-computer interface deals (应和脑科学, 聚芯医疗, 脑次元, 曦嘉医疗, 瓦博科技) landed in the same week, following BCI’s first appearance in the Government Work Report. Juxin Medical (聚芯医疗) closed a ¥200 million (~$28M) C round for endovascular BCI.

Spotlight

Spirit AI (千寻智能)

A+ Round, ¥1 billion (~$139M), valuation ¥15 billion (~$2.1B)

Full-stack humanoid robotics.

Spirit AI builds humanoid robots for manufacturing deployment. CEO Han Fengtao (韩峰涛) previously co-founded and served as CTO of Rokae Robotics (珞石机器人), where he oversaw delivery of 20,000+ industrial robots. Chief Scientist Gao Yang (高阳) is a Tsinghua assistant professor with a Berkeley PhD, supervised by Pieter Abbeel. Their Moz1 robot (26 degrees of freedom, full-body force control) is already deployed on CATL’s battery pack production line at the Zhongzhou base, running connector insertion at a 99%+ success rate and 3x human throughput. Bairui Capital (柏睿资本), founded by CATL co-founder Li Ping, invested at the angel stage, and the production-floor deployment followed.

Spirit raised ¥3 billion (~$417M) across two rounds in roughly 30 days in early 2026, on top of seed and angel rounds that had already brought total funding past ¥4 billion (~$556M). This A+ round was co-led by Shunwei Capital (顺为资本, Xiaomi founder & CEO Lei Jun’s fund) and Yunfeng Fund (云锋基金, Jack Ma’s fund), their first known co-investment in the embodied AI sector. Dachen Venture Capital (达晨财智), Turing Fund (图灵基金), and others joined. The February round had brought in Chaos Investment (混沌投资, hedge fund manager Ge Weidong), Sequoia China, and TCL Ventures.

In January 2026, Spirit open-sourced its VLA foundation model Spirit v1.5, which ranked first on the RoboChallenge global embodied AI benchmark, surpassing Pi0.5. The company claims its integrated force-control joints have 15% higher power density than Tesla Optimus, though no third party has independently verified this.

The company was founded in January 2024 and reached a ¥15 billion (~$2.1B) valuation within fourteen months.

Shunwei Capital (顺为资本, co-lead), Yunfeng Fund (云锋基金, co-lead), Dachen Venture Capital (达晨财智), Turing Fund (图灵基金), Xinding Capital (新鼎资本), Yinhe Yuanhui (银河源汇), and others. Gaohu Capital (高鹄资本) and Gengxin Capital (庚辛资本) as financial advisors.

Announcement

Nova Fusion (诺瓦聚变)

Angel+ Round, ¥700 million (~$97M), valuation ¥3.15 billion (~$438M)

FRC nuclear fusion for AI data center power.

Nova Fusion is building compact modular fusion reactors using field-reversed configuration (FRC) magnetic compression, a linear (not toroidal) design that requires smaller magnetic fields and produces more compact systems than traditional tokamaks. The target application is AI data center power, where training cluster power demand is outpacing grid capacity. The company’s roadmap runs from 100 million degree ion temperature through Q>1 (net energy gain) to 50MW commercial output.

Founder Guo Houyang (郭后扬) co-founded Energy Singularity (能量奇点), China’s other prominent fusion startup, and served as its CTO before departing to start Nova Fusion in April 2025. He holds a PhD from Université du Québec (1993) and has over 30 years in magnetic confinement fusion research across Canadian and US institutions. He currently serves as Deputy Director of Shanghai’s Future Industry Advanced Nuclear Energy Expert Committee. At Energy Singularity, he built the team that produced the Honghuang 70, a high-temperature superconducting tokamak. Nova Fusion’s FRC approach diverges from the tokamak design he worked on previously.

¥700 million (~$97M) at angel+ stage, on top of a ¥500 million (~$69M) angel round closed in August 2025, bringing total funding past ¥1.2 billion (~$167M) for a company founded just over a year ago. ENN Fusion (星环聚能) raised ¥1 billion (~$139M) in a January 2026 A round using a different magnetic reconnection approach, taking the sector’s single-round record. Chinese private fusion is entering what 21st Century Business Herald called “密集砸钱时代” (”intensive money-throwing era”), with policy tailwinds from both the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans including commercial fusion in national industrial planning.

Meituan Longzhu (美团龙珠), Hillhouse Capital (高瓴资本), Shangqi Capital (尚颀资本), Huichuan Venture Capital (汇川产投), Jiukun Ventures (九坤创投), with Legend Capital (君联资本), Gaorong Capital (高榕创投), and Lightspeed China (光合创投) following on from the angel round. Per ITJuzi, Guangzhou Industrial Investment (广州产投) and Xiamen C&D (厦门建发) also participated.

Announcement

Spacety (天仪研究院)

Strategic Round, ¥1.3 billion (~$181M) cumulative, valuation ¥7.8 billion (~$1.08B)

Commercial SAR satellite constellation.

Spacety operates China’s first commercial SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation, with 28 satellites in orbit and a planned build-out to 120. The constellation targets 0.5-meter resolution imagery with an average revisit cycle of 11 minutes for any point between 60°N and 60°S. The company’s millimeter-level surface deformation monitoring serves construction, transportation, power grid, and mining sectors.

Founded in 2015 in Changsha, Spacety has deployed its SAR data in 62 disaster response operations across Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, and other countries, making it one of the few Chinese commercial space companies with meaningful international operations. The company started IPO preparation in February 2026, filing for A-share listing.

This latest strategic round brings cumulative funding to ¥1.3 billion (~$181M) across multiple rounds, with a reported valuation of ¥7.8 billion (~$1.08B). The capital will fund scaled satellite manufacturing, commercialization of data services, and building an integrated develop-manage-use chain.

Bohua Capital (博华资本), Puhua Capital (普华资本), Turing Capital (图灵创投), Guoxin Guozheng (国新国证), Xiangjiang State Investment (湘江国投), and others. Yibai Capital (义柏资本) as financial advisor.

Announcement

ENGINEAI (众擎机器人)

Series B, $200 million (~¥1.44B), valuation ¥13 billion (~$1.8B)

Full-stack humanoid robots at consumer price points.

ENGINEAI ships three humanoid robot models. The SE01 (170cm, 55kg, 32 degrees of freedom, 330 N·m max joint torque, 2m/s walking speed) opened for global sales in December 2024 at $20,000-30,000. The PM01 is lighter and cheaper, currently listed at $13,700, and gained attention for what the company says was the first humanoid front flip, a stunt covered by New Atlas, Interesting Engineering, and other Western tech outlets. The T800 (173cm, 75kg, 450 N·m peak torque, NVIDIA Jetson Thor, 2,000 TOPS), unveiled at CES 2026 at a $25,000 starting price, targets heavy industrial deployment with first shipments planned for mid-2026. Founded October 2023 in Shenzhen by Zhao Tongyang (赵同阳).

The PM01 at $13,700 sits near Unitree’s G1 base model ($13,500) and well below current pricing estimates for Western humanoids like Figure AI’s commercial deployments. Luxshare Precision (立讯精密), which assembles Apple’s iPhones and AirPods, co-led this round as a strategic investor, bringing the same supply chain engineering that drove consumer electronics cost curves downward into humanoid manufacturing. Henan Investment Group (河南投资集团) co-led through its Huirong Fund (汇融基金). Cornerstone Capital (基石资本), Longgang Jinkong (龙岗金控), Duolun Technology (多伦科技), and others participated.

The company has described its commercialization strategy as deliberately slow, prioritizing technical depth over a rush to scale, though $200 million (~¥1.44B) of fresh capital and Luxshare on the cap table may test that approach.

Henan Investment Group / Huirong Fund (河南投资集团/汇融基金, co-lead), Luxshare Precision (立讯精密, co-lead/strategic), Cornerstone Capital (基石资本), and others.

Announcement

Shengshu Technology / Vidu (生数科技)

Strategic Round, ¥2 billion (~$293M)

Video generation AI.

Shengshu Technology builds Vidu, a video generation platform built on U-ViT (Universal Vision Transformer), an architecture the team published in September 2022 that predates OpenAI’s DiT architecture used in Sora. Chief Scientist Zhu Jun (朱军) is a Tsinghua University computer science professor who co-launched the company in partnership with the university’s AI Research Institute. The platform hit 10 million users within 100 days of its July 2024 global launch. Vidu Q3 Pro currently sits 7th on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard, behind ByteDance Seed, Kling, and several others. Vidu 2.0 (January 2025) generates 4-second clips in under 10 seconds at roughly $0.04 per second, 55% below the industry average. The platform has generated over 100 million video clips to date.

This is Alibaba’s second AI video bet, following a $60 million+ (~¥432M+) round into PixVerse in January. The Shengshu investment sits within Alibaba’s ¥380 billion ($53 billion) three-year AI and cloud infrastructure commitment. Alibaba Cloud revenue grew 26% to a three-year high, with AI product revenue posting triple-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters. The company frames its interest in Shengshu around “general world models” for sensory simulation toward AGI in physical environments, a broader bet than video content creation alone.

Alibaba Cloud (阿里巴巴, lead), Andon Haitang (安东海棠), China Internet Investment Fund (中国互联网投资基金), TAL Education Group (好未来), and Luminous Ventures.

Announcement

Also on the Radar

Red Bear AI (红熊AI) — Series A, ¥210 million (~$29M), ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. AI agent interactive platform with episodic memory architecture. ¥135 million (~$19M) in revenue at 13% net margin, making it one of the few profitable Chinese AI agent companies at this stage. CEO Wen De (ex-Alibaba, Fosun). Plans to expand internationally. Huayu Venture Capital (华禹创投, lead), Jiaming Haochun (嘉铭浩春), Jiawo Capital (稼沃资本), and others.

AWOL Vision (海高特) — Series B, close to ¥100 million (~$14M), ¥500 million (~$69M) valuation. Ultra-short-throw laser projectors. Two Kickstarter campaigns exceeding $10 million each under the Valerion brand. Miami office, US retail distribution, $1,899-5,999 price range. Western go-to-market further developed than any other company in this week’s data. Tiantang Silicon Valley (天堂硅谷), Huichang Technology (会畅科技), and Jinpeng Jia (金鹏佳).

Mizzen Insight (觅深科技) — Angel, close to $10 million (~¥72M), ¥260 million (~$36M) valuation. AI-powered user research platform that automates deep-dive customer interviews. 300 customers in four months, already deployed with overseas e-commerce and EV companies. Founded by Dr. Sun Keqiang (Tsinghua CS, CityU HK PhD). Sequoia Seed Fund (红杉种子基金, lead), Dachen Venture Capital (达晨财智), Jiacheng Capital (嘉程资本), and others.

ModelBest (面壁智能) — Series E, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥9.5 billion (~$1.32B) valuation. Edge-side general foundation models. Tsinghua-origin unicorn partnered with China Telecom for AIPC deployment. Shenzhen Capital Group (深创投, co-lead), Huichuan Venture Capital (汇川产投, co-lead), and others. Huaxing Securities (华兴证券) as FA.

Synapx (章鱼动力) — Angel, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥3 billion (~$417M) valuation. “Physical AGI” targeting the “Physical AI Turing Test.” Founded December 2025 by four ex-Horizon Robotics executives: Du Dalong (ex-CTO Jianzhi), Liang Zhujin (ex-VP), Pan Yangjia (ex-CFO), Fan Qingyuan (ex-VP). K3 Ventures (lead), Shunwei Capital (顺为资本), Xiaomi Group (小米集团), and others.

Holistic (霍里思特) — Series C, ¥200 million (~$28M), ¥1 billion (~$139M) valuation. X-ray AI ore sorting with 30%+ domestic market share across five ore types. All-Tsinghua founding team, founded 2010. China Merchants Capital (招商局资本, lead), Beichuang Investment (北创投), and others.

Enlight Medical (应和脑科学) — Strategic, undisclosed amount, ¥500 million (~$69M) valuation. Full proprietary neuromodulation and BCI platform covering electrodes, chips, signal decoding, and algorithms. Spun out from Yingmai Medical. Eli Lilly Asia Ventures reportedly co-led (per press; ITJuzi lists only Jiangxia Sci-Tech Investment (江夏科投)).

LEAPTIC (光子跃迁) — Angel, undisclosed. Corporate spinout from Dreame Technology (追觅科技, $2.8 billion valuation), building an 8K AI action camera at 55 grams, shipping at $440 versus GoPro at $400. Won a GMarks Design Award in Japan. Over 100 staff, already shipping. Sky Workshop Ventures (天空工场创投).

JNION (珈钠能源) — Series A+, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5 billion (~$208M) valuation. Sodium-ion battery cathode materials. Built the world’s first 10,000-tonne polyanionic cathode production line (December 2024). Founded by Prof. Cao Yuliang (Wuhan University). Shenzhen Capital (深圳资本) and EVE Energy (亿纬锂能).

Zhide Battery (致德新能源) — Series E, ¥600 million (~$83M), ¥3.6 billion (~$500M) valuation. Silicon-carbon anode materials for lithium batteries, solving the silicon swelling problem through carbon coating. CATL is an existing investor. Chaoxi Capital (朝希资本, co-lead), Dachen Venture Capital (达晨财智, co-lead), and others.

The Bigger Picture

Five BCI deals in one week

Brain-computer interface appeared in the 2026 NPC Government Work Report (政府工作报告) for the first time, listed alongside quantum technology and embodied intelligence as a priority future industry. Five neuro/BCI deals followed in the same week.

The deals cover different layers of the stack. Juxin Medical (聚芯医疗) raised ¥200 million (~$28M) at Series C for minimally invasive endovascular BCI and neuro-intervention devices, with Zhongshan Jinkong (中山金控) leading and Guangdong Finance (粤财创投) participating. Enlight Medical (应和脑科学) took a strategic round at a ¥500 million (~$69M) valuation for a full proprietary neuromodulation platform covering electrodes, chips, signal decoding, and algorithms, reportedly with Eli Lilly Asia Ventures involvement alongside Jiangxia Sci-Tech Investment (江夏科投). Xijia Medical (曦嘉医疗) raised an angel round for brain connectomics AI, with its NuraSurgical platform deployed in 120+ overseas hospitals across 10,000+ neurosurgery cases. Brain Dimension (脑次元) closed a ¥60 million (~$8.3M) strategic round for brain-science health services. WABO Technology (瓦博科技) took seed funding for consumer non-invasive BCI wearables.

The five deals this week follow a regulatory milestone: in March, Neuracle Medical Technology (博睿康) secured China’s first-ever approval for an implantable BCI system, a coin-sized wireless device placed on the brain’s surface to restore hand motor function in spinal cord injury patients. Per the National Medical Products Administration, it was the first globally approved invasive BCI available as a commercial product. Separately, StairMed (阶梯医疗) raised ¥500 million (~$69M) led by Alibaba in March, bringing its past-year total past ¥1.1 billion (~$153M), with plans to implant ~40 patients by end of 2026 — approaching Neuralink’s 21 reported trial cases.

In China’s industrial development pattern, explicit inclusion in the Government Work Report signals state and private capital to move. New energy vehicles, AI, and commercial spaceflight all followed the same sequence: government endorsement, then a capital surge within 12-18 months. BCI now has both the policy endorsement and the first commercial product approval. The Eli Lilly involvement in Enlight Medical, if confirmed, adds an international pharma dimension: a global company optioning access to Chinese neuromodulation through a minority stake.

Lithium niobate: The crystal that AI data centers will need next

AI training clusters are running into a physical bottleneck: the cables connecting GPUs inside data centers can’t move data fast enough. The current solution is silicon-based optical components that convert electrical signals to light and back. But as connection speeds push past 1.6 terabits per second, silicon hits its physical limits. The leading replacement is a crystal called lithium niobate, which can switch light signals roughly 10x faster. Whoever controls the supply chain for lithium niobate photonics controls a chokepoint in next-generation AI infrastructure.

Three deals this week cover that entire supply chain in China, from raw material to finished chip. Weima Semiconductor Materials (威迈芯材) raised a strategic round for the chemical precursors used to pattern photonic circuits — the company operates two production plants in Korea and claims to be China’s first commercial producer in this category. New Silicon Convergence (新硅聚合), spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, raised a strategic round backed by Shenzhen Capital (深创投) and the National Innovation Fund (国新科创基金) for the crystal wafers themselves — the physical substrate that chips are built on, already sold to 200+ customers globally. Precision Photonics Core (极刻光核) closed a B+ round for the finished product: photonic chips that go into data center interconnects. Founder Liang Hanxiao holds a PhD from the University of Rochester.

Raw materials, wafer substrates, and chip design, all funded in the same week, all domestic. China is building the full stack for a technology that doesn’t matter much today but will matter enormously once AI clusters outgrow current optical infrastructure.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Verify all figures independently before acting on them.

Where capital flows tells you where talent is concentrating, where production capacity is being built, and which technologies will reach commercial scale first.

The China Round is free, published every Friday, and written for investors, operators, and founders tracking where China’s tech capital is moving and why it matters.

About the author: Dermot McGrath is Irish, based in Shanghai, a decade in China’s tech and investment ecosystem, fluent Mandarin. Co-founded a VC fund scaled to nine-figure AUM. Now running ZenGen Labs, a cross-border strategy studio covering AI, robotics, and deep tech.

Where the Money Went

130 funding events across four sectors. Over $1.4 billion in disclosed capital. Three quantum computing raises totalling over ¥1.6 billion. Angel-stage valuations that would have been Series B territory two years ago. The A/A+ stage accounts for 38% of all deals, but the signal is loudest at the extremes.

🤖 Robotics (27 deals)

The busiest sector by narrative weight. 27 raises in seven days, at least eight of them embodied AI or humanoid plays. Galaxea AI (星海图) led with ¥2 billion (~$280M) for a B+ round, valuing the company at ¥20 billion. JAKA Robotics (节卡机器人) closed an E round at a ¥6 billion valuation, one of a handful of Chinese cobot companies with real international footprint. At the early end, multiple seed and angel rounds for companies building everything from cooking robots to ocean-floor inspection vehicles.

Stage breakdown: 11 angel/seed, 9 A/A+, 5 B+, 2 strategic. The early-stage density signals continued new entrant formation, not just incumbents scaling.

🧠 AI (18 deals)

18 deals, but the individual bets run larger than the count suggests. MOSI Intelligence (模思智能) pulled in hundreds of millions of RMB at angel stage for speech-first foundation models. Tsingwei (清微智能) hit Pre-IPO stage for AI inference chips. The rest skew early: lots of angel and Pre-A rounds for vertical AI applications (drug discovery, gaming, spatial reasoning, pet tech).

⚙️ Advanced Manufacturing (78 deals)

The largest category by volume, and the most diverse. Sub-sectors span semiconductors (~15 deals), hydrogen and energy storage (~10), aerospace and eVTOL (~6), lasers and photonics (~5), new materials (~8), and a long tail of sensors, drones, and industrial components. Headline deal: CIX Technology (此芯科技) raised ¥1 billion (~$140M) for ARM-compatible AI PC chips. EPG (易普集) closed $100M for modular data centers backed by Alibaba Cloud and BlackRock’s Decarbonization Partners.

💡 Frontier Tech (7 deals)

Small by count, massive by capital. Three quantum computing raises (see theme below). One invasive BCI company. Two synthetic biology startups. One display chip maker.

Spotlight

QBoson (玻色量子)

Series B, ¥1 billion (~$140M), ¥7 billion valuation (~$970M)

Photonic quantum computing.

QBoson builds photonic quantum computers for commercial deployment. CEO Wen Kai holds a Stanford PhD in quantum computing; the founding team includes researchers from Stanford, Tsinghua, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They have already shipped China’s first commercial photonic quantum computer, with 10+ units delivered to clients including the National Supercomputing Center in Chengdu and China Mobile. Their current system runs 550 qubits, with a 1,000-qubit model on the roadmap. QBoson broke ground on the world’s first dedicated photonic quantum computer manufacturing facility in Shenzhen last year.

Most quantum computers (IBM’s, Google’s, the ones generating the headlines) run on superconducting qubits that require cooling to near absolute zero, which means expensive dilution refrigerators and lab-scale infrastructure. Photonic quantum computers use particles of light instead, operate at room temperature, and are significantly easier to manufacture and deploy. The trade-off has historically been lower qubit fidelity, but photonics opens a path to commercial deployment that superconducting systems don’t. China has largely ceded the superconducting race to the US; photonics is the bet that there’s a different lane worth winning.

ICBC Capital (工银资本) and Shunxi Fund (顺禧基金) co-led, alongside Beijing Financial Holdings and others.

Announcement

Galaxea AI (星海图)

Series B+, ¥2 billion (~$280M), ¥20 billion valuation (~$2.8B)

Embodied AI humanoid robot platform.

Galaxea AI builds universal dual-arm humanoid robot platforms (R1 Pro, R1 Lite) targeting factory-floor deployment and, eventually, general-purpose use. Founded September 2023 by Jiyang Gao (born 1992), Tsinghua to USC to Waymo to Momenta. Co-founded with Tsinghua robotics professor Huazhe Xu, who left in February 2026 to start Breaking Shell Robotics (see below). Meituan has been a major strategic investor since 2023. Per 36kr, the B round and this B+ round closed within a single month of each other. ¥20 billion valuation for a company two and a half years old. Target: 1,000 units shipped by end of 2026.

The wider bet is on becoming the platform layer for embodied AI: a robot learning to navigate and manipulate the real world will develop capabilities that a language model running in a data center never can. In the US, Figure, Physical Intelligence, and Apptronik are the main funded challengers. In China the serious platform plays are fewer: Unitree (already at 5,500 units per year at consumer price points), Agibot, and Galaxea. Chinese manufacturers have factory floors willing to deploy right now, giving China a training data advantage that’s hard to replicate from a US lab.

Lens Technology (蓝思科技), Silicon Core Ventures (矽芯投资), and 10 others; Huaxing Capital (华兴资本) as financial advisor.

Announcement

MOSI Intelligence (模思智能)

Angel, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5 billion valuation (~$210M)

Speech-first foundation models.

MOSI Intelligence builds speech-first foundation models with a unified token structure across voice, video, text, and image. Founded November 2024 by Fudan professor Qiu Xipeng, who won the CCF-ACM AI Award and built MOSS, China’s first open-source ChatGPT alternative, in February 2023. Hundreds of millions of RMB at angel stage, ¥1.5 billion valuation, for a company founded 16 months ago by an academic.

Most Chinese AI labs started with text and added speech later. Qiu is going the other direction: voice as the primary modality. The product lineage (SpeechGPT, AnyGPT, MOSS-TTS series) is academic but credible. Target applications include consumer electronics, autonomous vehicles, and embodied AI, all domains where voice interaction matters more than text. The commercial question is whether speech-first is a genuine architectural advantage or a differentiated pitch, especially against established Chinese frontier models like Kimi and Minimax.

IDG Capital (IDG资本) led, with Yuanhe Holdings (元禾控股), MiraclePlus (奇绩创坛), Shanghai Future Industry Fund (上海未来产业基金), and others.

Announcement

CIX Technology (此芯科技)

Series B, ¥1 billion (~$140M), ¥8 billion valuation (~$1.1B)

ARM-compatible AI chips for PCs and edge devices.

CIX Technology builds ARM-compatible AI chips for PCs and edge devices. CEO Hank Sun was AMD’s SOC director and head of AMD’s China semiconductor business. CTO Fang Liu spent 11 years at Apple on CPU/GPU architecture, then SOC work at Meta and AMD. That concentration of semiconductor talent in a single founding team is rare. Their CIX P1 chip (6nm, 12-core ARM CPU, 30 TOPS NPU, 45 TOPS combined with CPU and GPU) is already in Minisforum mini PCs shipping to consumers.

China’s semiconductor conversation has been dominated by datacenter GPUs, the race to replace Nvidia H100s. CIX is playing a different field: the billions of edge devices that need local AI inference without a data center connection. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X competes in the same space globally; the P1 is one of the first Chinese-designed chips to reach commercial production with OEM partnerships.

Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (上海集成电路产业投资基金) and Pudong Venture Capital (浦东创投) co-led, with Oriza Ventures (元禾璞华), Lenovo Ventures, and others.

Announcement

Breaking Shell Robotics (破壳机器人)

Angel, tens of millions of USD, ¥2.6 billion valuation (~$360M)

Home robots. That is nearly everything publicly known about this company.

The founder is Xu Huazhe (许华哲), a Tsinghua assistant professor who co-founded Galaxea AI and served as its Chief Scientist before leaving in February 2026. Galaxea provided the seed investment. That pedigree explains the ¥2.6 billion valuation at angel stage with almost no public information: investors are backing the person, not a product.

Xu laid out his thesis at the Zhongguancun Forum on March 29. Breaking Shell will build its own hardware (vertical integration, not outsourced bodies) and focus on a narrow set of household tasks rather than chasing full generalization. Object passing and tidying first, then storage and cleaning. Cooking will appear as demos but not as a product. No physical contact tasks (elderly care, childcare) for now. The bet is that defining 10 tasks precisely and collecting targeted data will scale faster than building a 21-degree-of-freedom generalist that can’t do any single task reliably.

Also on the Radar

Unitary Quantum (幺正量子) — Pre-A, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥1.5 billion valuation. Ion trap quantum computing out of Hefei. Geely (automaker) and Ant Group (fintech) co-led. An unusual investor pairing that suggests quantum is entering the strategic planning of companies far outside the usual deep tech investor base.

SpinQ (量旋科技) — Series C+, ¥600 million (~$83M), ¥3 billion valuation. Superconducting and NMR quantum computers already shipping to 200+ institutions across 40+ countries. Revenue hit ¥50 million in 2024. The most commercially mature quantum company in China, possibly in Asia.

JAKA Robotics (节卡机器人) — Series E, ¥6 billion valuation. Collaborative robots deployed in 100+ countries with offices in Japan, Germany, the US, Malaysia, and Singapore. Customers include Toyota and Schneider Electric. 21.9% of China’s cobot market. Shanghai-based.

EPG (易普集) — Series B+, $100 million, ¥3.9 billion valuation. Prefabricated modular data centers. Alibaba Cloud and Decarbonization Partners (BlackRock/Temasek JV) co-invested. Offices across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. One of the few companies in this dataset already operating globally.

Mingshi BCI (明视脑机) — Angel, ¥150 million (~$21M), ¥750 million valuation. Invasive brain-computer interface for neural applications. Backed by 中科创星 (CASSTAR). China approved its first commercial BCI implant in March 2026 (Neuracle Technology, for paralysis patients), and capital is following.

Bowintec (博银合创) — Series A, undisclosed amount. Dexterous robotics. The sole investor: Bosch China. A sole bet from a German industrial giant on a Chinese dexterous robotics startup.

RoboParty (萝博派对) — Angel, $20 million, ¥715 million valuation. Humanoid bipedal robots. Guoxiang Capital (国香资本) and Matrix Partners China (经纬创投) co-led. Limited public information, but top-tier VC confidence at angel stage.

Lingravity (零重力飞机工业) — Pre-B, ¥150 million (~$21M), ¥4.5 billion valuation. eVTOL aircraft plus electric fixed-wing (RX1E, already certified for commercial delivery). Led by Xiang Jinwu, a Chinese Academy of Engineering academician. Team from AVIC and COMAC. Xichuang Investment (锡创投), Huikai Investment (惠开投资), and Jinpu Investment (金浦投资) among investors. Based in Hefei with R&D in Nanjing, Shenzhen, and Wuhu.

快酷创新 — Series A, undisclosed. Smart self-service haircutting devices. Investors: Hillhouse Capital (高瓴创投) and MiraclePlus (奇绩创坛). Hillhouse backing an automated barber is the most unexpected bet in a dataset dominated by chips and humanoids.

Differential Robotics (微分智飞) — Series A, hundreds of millions of RMB, ¥2.6 billion valuation. Intelligent drone swarm systems for industrial and urban inspection. Founded July 2024. Huakong Fund (华控基金) led, with Baidu Ventures and others. Nine months from founding to a ¥2.6 billion valuation.

The Bigger Picture

China’s quantum moment

Three quantum computing deals totalling over ¥1.6 billion in disclosed funding, each using a different technological approach: photonic (QBoson), superconducting/NMR (SpinQ), and ion trap (Unitary Quantum). That spread suggests a coordinated infrastructure build across all three major technological approaches.

China’s public quantum funding stands at an estimated $15 billion, nearly four times the U.S. government’s $4 billion. Late last year the State Council launched the National Venture Capital Guidance Fund, seeding ¥121.8 billion across three regional funds covering frontier tech from AI to quantum to 6G, with a target scale of ¥1 trillion. The new signal is who’s writing the checks. ICBC’s investment arm leading QBoson’s round. Geely and Ant Group co-leading Unitary Quantum. ICBC is China’s largest state bank. Geely makes cars. Ant Group runs payments. None of them are specialist deep tech investors. Their presence in the same technology category in the same week points to broad institutional conviction (or FOMO), the kind that precedes large procurement and deployment decisions.

SpinQ’s numbers add context: ¥50 million in revenue in 2024, a chip already shipped to the Middle East. Parts of this are already commercial.

The billion-dollar angel

Multiple companies in this dataset hit billion-RMB valuations at angel or seed stage with minimal or no shipped products. Breaking Shell Robotics at ¥2.6 billion. MOSI Intelligence at ¥1.5 billion. Differential Robotics at ¥2.6 billion (see Also on the Radar).

The pattern extends beyond China. Globally, AI seed-stage companies now command a 42% valuation premium over non-AI startups. Even across all sectors, Carta data shows US median seed valuations up 60% in three years to $24 million.

Breaking Shell hit ¥2.6 billion (~$360 million) at angel stage. That’s 15x the US median seed, for a company with no public product. Breaking Shell’s valuation is entirely a bet on Xu Huazhe’s Tsinghua/Galaxea track record. MOSI’s is a bet on Qiu Xipeng’s MOSS lineage. Differential’s is a bet on the team behind it, nine months in.

The question is whether these valuations reflect genuine conviction in specific teams (the Kunlun Xing model: two resumes, no product, $1 billion in 10 days) or whether capital is chasing sector allocation targets, and the honest answer is probably both operating simultaneously.

Robotics: the 2021 autonomous driving moment

27 robotics deals in seven days. By industry estimates, the sector has grown from roughly 120 companies to over 320 in three years. Per the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, embodied intelligence recorded ¥73.5 billion in financing across 740+ deals in 2025. At least six startups secured $100 million or more in early 2026 alone.

Chinese media has started drawing the comparison to autonomous driving’s 2021 peak, when hundreds of AD companies raised billions before the market consolidated violently. The NDRC has warned about a bubble, flagging “low-level duplication” across 150+ companies chasing immature technology routes and unclear commercialization models. The NEV precedent is instructive: roughly 400 Chinese EV companies ceased operations between 2018 and 2025, leaving around 100 active, with McKinsey projecting fewer than 50 by 2030. A similar shakeout looks likely here.

The data this week supports the saturation thesis. Eight of the 27 robotics deals are embodied AI or humanoid plays. Most are at angel or Pre-A stage. Most have undisclosed amounts. The long tail is getting very long.

The counter-signal is the industrial layer. Companies like JAKA Robotics (cobots, E round, 100+ countries) and Bowintec (Bosch’s sole bet) suggest that the industrial robotics layer, the unglamorous part, is maturing separately from the humanoid hype cycle. The companies building components, sensors, and motion control systems may benefit regardless of which humanoid companies survive.

Deal data compiled from Chinese corporate announcements, financial news, and investment databases. Amounts and valuations are as reported and may be incomplete.

Twelve days earlier, in Wuxi, a Jiangsu province city that has become one of China’s biggest commercial aerospace hubs, thirteen companies signed the incorporation documents for 星联体 (”Star Consortium”).

With registered capital of ¥2 billion, it’s the largest registered private commercial aerospace enterprise in China. The founding partners include some of the country’s most active commercial satellite operators, and the business model is, structurally, the opposite of SpaceX.

The two aren’t rivals in any useful financial sense (one is targeting a $1.75 trillion public valuation, the other has ¥2 billion in registered capital) but they represent two different theories of how commercial space infrastructure gets built, both targeting the same 2027-2028 window.

The Trillion-Dollar Stack

SpaceX’s S-1 is still confidential, though the public moves over the past two months sketch the thesis clearly enough. In early February, SpaceX announced a deal to acquire xAI, Musk’s AI company, valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. The rationale was to integrate xAI’s compute with Starlink’s satellite network to build orbital data centers, solar-powered AI infrastructure running in low Earth orbit.

Ok. But. Why?

Data centers are bottlenecked by power grid access, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and terrestrial fiber connectivity. An orbital layer sidesteps all of them. Satellites have line-of-sight to any point on Earth and can route compute dynamically without laying cable. Whether the economics work is unresolved. Hardening hardware for orbit, tolerating latency on AI workloads, dissipating heat in a vacuum: none of these are solved problems at commercial scale. But SpaceX’s actual business is strong enough that investors can price the company on the vision and absorb the uncertainty.

Revenue hit roughly $15-16 billion in 2025, with Starlink accounting for $10.4 billion across 9 million subscribers. Free cash flow was around $2 billion, forecast to reach $5 billion in 2026. Active government contracts total $22 billion, including classified work through Starshield, the military satellite program. The IPO packages rockets, satellites, internet service, military infrastructure, and AI compute into a single entity, with each layer in theory feeding the others.

The xAI deal brings scale and complications together. Grok generated 3 million harmful images over an 11-day period in late 2025, triggering lawsuits (including a suit from the city of Baltimore), UK regulatory investigations, Southeast Asian bans, and enforcement action from New York’s attorney general. Those liabilities will require disclosure when the S-1 goes public. There’s also a CFIUS review underway because xAI has foreign investors including Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, while SpaceX handles ITAR-controlled military hardware. Reports suggest this friction pushed the filing from February to yesterday. A June or July listing target leaves limited runway to resolve them.

Space for One More?

Even with those overhangs, SpaceX is filing from a position no competitor has come close to replicating. It built its dominance by owning the full stack, and the track record for everyone who tried to compete without that suggests it’s not optional.

Amazon’s Kuiper constellation had roughly 212 production satellites in orbit as of late 2025, and has already filed to extend its FCC deployment deadline from July 2026 to July 2028. It has AWS as a natural distribution channel and deep capital, but it does not own its rockets and does not own the full stack.

OneWeb made the case more starkly. It launched a first-generation low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, ran out of money in 2020, and filed for bankruptcy before the service reached commercial viability. The UK government and Bharti Global acquired it out of administration, and it eventually merged with Eutelsat in 2023. The capital ran out because OneWeb tried to compete with Starlink on internet service without Starlink’s launch cost advantage, government contract floor, or ability to iterate on hardware.

Competing head-on with Starlink for consumer internet, without owning the rockets and the full vertical stack, doesn’t add up economically.

China’s commercial space companies are building for a different market entirely, but have likely learned from these case studies. Star Consortium exists to get them there faster than any one of them could alone.

The Wuxi Model

Star Consortium is targeting the industrial and government services market, selling maritime domain awareness, precision agriculture sensing, urban IoT, and emergency communications to Chinese shipping companies, provincial agriculture bureaus, and city governments. That market requires being operational, reliable, and cheaper than ground-based sensor networks or imported satellite data services, without needing to match Starlink on price or global coverage.

The consortium was formally established on March 20 at a development conference in Wuxi’s Liangxi District. Four of China’s top ten private commercial space companies are based in Wuxi, a concentration that reflects sustained provincial investment over the past decade. The thirteen founding partners include LandSpace (蓝箭航天), Space Pioneer (天兵科技), Oriental Space (东方空间), and Galaxy Aerospace (银河航天), alongside district-level investment groups and smaller satellite and terminal hardware companies. Registered capital surpasses Chang Guang Satellite Technology’s (长光卫星) ¥1.97 billion.

Star Consortium integrates eight existing constellation projects under a shared operational platform covering rocket launches, satellite manufacturing, payload development, terminal applications, and data operations. The stated model is “state-owned leadership, industrial coordination, market-oriented mechanism,” where provincial capital sets the frame, private companies execute within it.

The playbook is familiar in China. Local governments seeded the EV industry the same way, guaranteeing bus fleet procurement so manufacturers like BYD could iterate on battery tech and drive costs down before the consumer market was ready. Wuxi appears to be running the same sequence with satellites and launch services.

Tianyuan Constellation

The flagship initiative is the 天源星座 (”Tianyuan Constellation”), one high-orbit satellite and 216 low-orbit satellites, targeting completion by 2028. In 2026, development begins on the first batch, with 6-8 experimental satellites planned for launch. The strategy is “build while operating,” selling services on partial infrastructure while the full constellation assembles, rather than waiting for completion before taking customers.

Galaxy Aerospace’s Dual Play

Galaxy Aerospace is one of the thirteen founders, and filed its own IPO advisory on March 30, ten days after signing on to Star Consortium. That dual position, equity member in the shared platform while simultaneously seeking independent public capital, shows how the Chinese commercial space sector is positioning for the next few years. Operational assets get pooled for efficiency; the companies remain separately financed. Galaxy Aerospace’s Series C drew 全国社保基金 (”National Social Security Fund”) and 中央汇金 (”Central Huijin”), state capital designed for long-duration holds rather than venture exits. Its IPO materials cite progress in direct-to-mobile satellite technology; the company deployed over 20 satellites in 2025 against a production capacity of 100 per year.

Two Theories, A New Space Race?

Both models are betting that commercial space infrastructure, not publicly funded programs like Artemis II, will define who controls orbital services by the end of the decade. They disagree on how to build it.

SpaceX’s answer is vertical integration. Own the rockets, the satellites, the distribution, the compute. Each layer compounds the others. Starlink revenue funds Starship development, Starship reduces launch costs, lower launch costs improve Starlink margins, the orbital compute layer extends the value of every satellite already in orbit. The logic requires a single entity capable of absorbing losses at each stage while the compounding builds. Musk has that entity, and US government contracts provide a revenue floor while the commercial side matures.

Star Consortium starts from different constraints. No Chinese commercial space company has SpaceX’s balance sheet, and none has a Pentagon-equivalent relationship to lean on while the market develops. The assets exist (satellites, rockets, data operations, terminal hardware) but they sit across organizations with different investors and different timelines. Pooling them under a shared platform makes each component more valuable without requiring any company to acquire the others. Provincial capital provides patience where venture capital would demand exits; the private operators provide commercial urgency where state-owned enterprises typically cannot.

The Unresolved Questions

Both theories target the same 2027-2028 window, and both have hard dependencies that could slip.

When SpaceX’s S-1 becomes public, the conversation will centre on valuation multiples, Starlink subscriber growth, and Grok’s legal exposure in formal disclosure. Whether the orbital data center thesis is achievable on any near-term timeline is a harder question, and the IPO prices SpaceX on that vision without needing to resolve it.

The Launch Cost Bottleneck

On the Chinese side, the 2027-2028 viability target depends on launch cost reductions happening roughly on schedule. LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 (朱雀三号) attempted its first stage recovery in December 2025 and failed. The company is targeting a recovery test in Q2 2026, with the first full reuse flight in Q4 if that succeeds. The goal is to cut launch costs from around 100,000 yuan per kilogram to 20,000 yuan per kilogram. Until that or something close to it is achieved, the economics of running a commercial constellation at scale don’t make sense. Deep Blue Aerospace has vehicles at the pad with similar ambitions.

Thirteen Partners, One Platform

Then there’s the coordination problem. Star Consortium has to execute across thirteen partners with different investors, different timelines, and different commercial incentives. Shared platforms hold together until the partners’ interests diverge, and that divergence is predictable, whether it’s a member finding a better commercial use for its satellite capacity than the shared plan allocates, or IPO pressure pushing a company toward maximizing its own metrics. The “state-owned leadership” component (read guaranteed customers) may be what holds it together through those tensions. It may also be what makes the structure slow when speed is what the market rewards.

Can thirteen companies with different owners share operational infrastructure across a full space stack without coordination costs consuming the efficiency gains? Can Galaxy Aerospace run as both a consortium member and a separately listed public company without those two roles pulling in different directions?

Both ideas are in orbit. Who knows where they’ll land.