Capital O Closes First Fund, Post-90s GP Enters the Stage

By Lixin He and Yu Tian

Dark Tide Waves has learned that frontier technology fund Capital O recently completed the first close of its debut USD fund. Its limited partners include founders of top US-listed tech companies, leading emerging hedge funds, and established family offices with deep industry roots. Subsequent closes are underway.

Capital O was founded by David Liu alongside successful entrepreneurs in AI and other frontier technology fields. After graduating from MIT, Liu entered the investment world and has since focused on frontier tech, leading multiple investments at ZP Capital, CDH Investments, and Sky9 Capital — including TuSimple (NASDAQ: TSP), WeRide, XtalPi, Xbiome, neoX Biotech, Revir, VisionICs, and Theta Lab. Among his early-stage investments, he achieved a decacorn exit with a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

Just four months since its founding, Capital O has already completed several investments, all in companies founded by entrepreneurs with substantial technical and industry expertise. The fund has also built a pipeline of under-the-radar projects, participating deeply in their incubation.

On investment strategy, Capital O maintains a sharp focus on early-stage opportunities in frontier technology, systematically identifying the next wave of paradigm shifts comparable to autonomous driving in 2015 and AI drug discovery in 2018. At the same time, it leverages nearly a decade of accumulated high-quality deal flow from the team's network to generate near-term DPI.

As the mobile internet era of paradigm innovation draws to a close, the next golden cycle of frontier technology has already begun. Capital O's view: technological breakthroughs deserve more attention than market turbulence.

Looking back over the past two decades, every rebound following a major downturn in a bear cycle has been powered by new technological infrastructure. From the emergence of Web 2.0 in 2000 to the proliferation of 3G and smartphone hardware in 2007, breakthroughs in new tech infrastructure have consistently germinated during periods of economic volatility, seeding the next recovery. Today is no exception. In Capital O's assessment, 2024 marks a critical inflection point, with anticipated milestones including mass production and delivery of autonomous vehicles, AI-discovered drugs reaching the market and scaling in R&D participation, and explosive growth in blockchain application layers.

Guided by this strategy, the Capital O team has long tracked what it calls the NTIC trend — New Tech Infrastructure Commoditizing — aiming to capture excess returns that transcend economic cycles and geopolitical friction.

Moreover, frontier tech investment exhibits a "point to surface" dynamic. In an industry's early days, paradigm shifts are typically spearheaded by top-tier entrepreneurial teams, appearing as discrete breakthroughs in specific technologies or platform-level innovations. As one such point grows and matures, it catalyzes transformation across the value chain, spawning new suppliers and new production relationships. Around 2015, for instance, fewer than five companies were genuinely pursuing autonomous driving; today, the technology is deploying across diverse scenarios and becoming tangible to consumers. Capital O strives to identify these inflection points early, then expand from point to surface, exploring upstream and downstream opportunities.

On the human dimension, having a founding partner from the post-90s generation is a distinctive advantage for Capital O: he is "same age, same circle" as the core entrepreneurial cohort.

What does "same age" mean? The driving force in frontier tech entrepreneurship today largely consists of those born between 1985 and 1995. One telling data point: in this year's X·36Under36 survey of over 1,000 entrepreneurs, founders with technical backgrounds accounted for 73% — far higher than in previous age cohorts — and the average age of listed entrepreneurs was just 31. China's dividend of young engineers and scientists is approaching a tipping point. The core team at TuSimple, which David Liu backed at the angel stage, was around 35 years old.

What does "same circle" mean? In AI drug discovery, for example, leading companies and industry pioneers often have deep ties with Liu dating back to his time at MIT, ensuring acute sensitivity to developments on the industry side. The swift first close of this new fund also drew investment support from multiple former partners.

"David was among TuSimple's earliest investors, and one of the first in the industry to truly understand autonomous driving," said Mo Chen, Chairman of TuSimple. "He participated deeply in every round of our financing across three different funds, accompanying the company all the way to our IPO. We deeply value that kind of long-term partnership."

A people-first, endgame-oriented infinite game is also embedded in the fund's name, reflecting Capital O's own "ecosystem philosophy." As Liu explains it, "O represents the starting point, the fulfilled endpoint, and the ecosystem itself. Behind every successful entrepreneur lies an ecosystem; between entrepreneurs lies an ecosystem; between young investors lies an ecosystem too."

Capital O will continue to join hands with a new generation of technology talent to become pioneers, co-builders, and long-term value creators for future industries. "In the wave of technological transformation, changes large and small are unfolding across every industry. Capital O's mission is to stand on the right side of change, together with all participants in our ecosystem."

Image source: Company provided

Layout: Yunxiao Guo