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 is where talent concentrates, where production capacity gets built, and where the next commercial technologies will come from.
The China Round is free, published weekly, 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.
222 filings this week. The single biggest check went to a company that’s already public, and it went into a subsidiary. A robotics professor raised $100 million twice in 33 days. A June government directive may be tying this week’s AI, chip, and robotics capital into one policy-driven stack. And two city governments wrote checks into the same startup’s round, nine weeks after Beijing told them to stop competing. Here’s where the money went.
Where the Money Went
AI 53 | Semis 39 | Adv. Mfg 42 | Robotics 33 | Energy 29 | Frontier 13 | Aero 13
222 deals | 24 deals disclosed a combined $2.04B (~¥14.7B)
AI led the week on deal count (53 of 222 filings), but most of that volume was small and undisclosed. Only 24 of 222 deals disclosed a figure at all. Semiconductors, with only 39 deals, pulled in nearly half the week’s disclosed capital, $973M of the $2.04B total. Almost all of that came from one deal: ESWIN Materials’ ¥6.5 billion (~$903M) capital increase into its Wuhan wafer subsidiary. Robotics saw two standouts: DISCOVER Robotics raised roughly $100 million twice in 33 days, and Konvery brought three robot manufacturers onto its cap table as strategic investors. In AI, Gradence reported the top coding benchmark score, though we couldn’t find the company on the benchmark sites it references. Five quantum computing deals landed this week, all on the Radar. Aerospace stayed state-anchored, with i-Space closing another ¥1 billion (~$139M) tranche of its E round on the way to a STAR Market listing (the Shanghai exchange’s board for high-growth tech companies).
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Spotlight
Gradence (梯度回音)
Angel Round, Undisclosed Amount, Valuation Undisclosed
A multi-agent coding harness running on top of OpenAI’s model claims the top benchmark scores in software engineering.