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
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.