The China Round is a weekly report tracking venture and strategic investment activity across China’s core technology sectors: AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, and frontier tech. These deals span semiconductors, autonomous driving, quantum computing, hydrogen and energy storage, eVTOL, brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and more.
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.