From Mortgaging His House to Building the World's Largest Autonomous Fleet: Yu Enyuan's Seven-Year All-In Bet | Yunqi Capital Doers

From parcel lockers to autonomous vehicles, from mortgaging his home to holding 30,000 orders — over seven years of entrepreneurship, Enyuan Yu has led Neolix through solitude and struggle, finally deploying over 7,500 units by 2025 and reaching an inflection point where breaking 10,000 seems within reach.

The full-stack DNA of understanding logistics, technology, and vehicle manufacturing is what gave Yunqi Capital the conviction to "bet" on Neolix during its difficult early fundraising days. Looking back now, accompanying this low-cost, all-weather "ant army" of autonomous vehicles on its growth journey is precisely the original aspiration behind our mission to help technology transform lives.

In this episode of "Yunqi Doers", we share the story of Enyuan Yu, founder and CEO of Neolix.

This article is republished from China Entrepreneur*, by Yafei Ren. Original headline: "Li Auto Founder's Old Friend, 7 Years of Entrepreneurship, Rejected Masayoshi Son's Controlling Stake, Aims to Be the Tesla of Commercial Vehicles"*

After the Lunar New Year, Enyuan Yu's schedule was packed to the brim.

At 2 a.m. on the day of the interview, he was still on a call. That afternoon, he attended two back-to-back roadshows. When the two-and-a-half-hour interview ended at 8 p.m., Yu rested for just half an hour before rushing off to meet a client.

Yu jokes that the reason he still keeps in such good shape is that he's constantly catching flights and trains.

In the logistics industry, Yu is a serial entrepreneur. His previous venture developed parcel lockers and produced barcode scanners for last-mile logistics scenarios, generating annual revenue of several hundred million yuan with profits in the tens of millions. As his experience inventing logistics technology products grew, Yu turned his attention to autonomous delivery, beginning to incubate delivery robots internally in 2016.

In 2018, Yu officially founded Neolix, focusing on the L4 autonomous logistics vehicle market. After several years of grinding through a difficult period, this year he finally saw the industry inflection point for autonomous delivery vehicles arrive.

As the cost of autonomous delivery vehicles dropped to one-quarter that of traditional logistics vehicles, the industry finally exploded. He predicts that the sector's growth this year will be 10 times that of last year.

Yunqi Capital participated in multiple rounds of Neolix's funding. According to partner Chen Yu, another key reason for the industry breakout is that as technology matured and road access accelerated, market education has largely been completed — "the major express companies and SF Express have finally realized the importance of autonomous delivery vehicles, and they're placing orders like crazy."

In 2024, SF Express placed an order for 1,600 Neolix vehicles, setting a record for the largest single order in the industry. By the end of 2024, Neolix had cumulatively deployed over 2,000 autonomous delivery vehicles. Entering 2025, Neolix kicked off the year with more than 20,000 new orders, completed a 1 billion yuan Series C+ round in February, and formed a strategic partnership with ZTO Express in April.

"One month this year equals a whole year's worth of work in the past." Yu repeated this multiple times during the interview.

In 2025, Neolix plans to deploy 10,000 autonomous vehicles — a scale no L4 autonomous vehicle company has yet achieved. Data shows that as of the end of July, Neolix had more than 7,000 vehicles in operation, making it the world's largest autonomous delivery fleet. The company currently holds nearly 30,000 orders in hand and is the largest supplier of autonomous vehicles to SF Express, JD.com, and China Post.

But as the industry enters the fast lane, Neolix also faces challenges from all sides.

Yu isn't afraid of competition. "What we provide clients is a mobility platform, a complete solution — not simply a vehicle. That's our core moat. For any other autonomous driving company to break in, they'd have to attack not just the technology but the solution itself." In Yu's view, the market is large enough that the real heavyweights haven't even arrived yet. "What we're thinking about now is how to prepare for the next opponent after winning this battle. My goal is to stay at the table."

01 Solitude

Xiang Li is an old friend of Yu's. In 2016, Li founded Chehejia (later renamed Li Auto). When they started their respective ventures, they had an unspoken agreement: one would move people, the other would move goods. Yu's team developed a delivery robot prototype by the end of 2017. After seeing it, Li told him: "Lao Yu, either go all in or give up."

"I'll go all in," Yu said.

In 2018, Neolix was officially established.

Beyond strengthening his conviction to start the company, Li gave Yu two major "gifts." The first was capital — Li Auto remains Neolix's second-largest shareholder to this day. The second was chassis design and "half a production line." When Chehejia's low-speed electric SEV project was halted due to unclear policies, Li licensed the SEV chassis and production line to Neolix, on which basis the company built its Changzhou factory.

Yu says Li is half a mentor to him. "He's someone with absolutely no reservations — whatever comes to mind, he'll tell you his experience and perspective directly."

By June 2018, Neolix had already mass-produced 100 autonomous delivery vehicles, deployed on operating routes in Xiong'an and Changzhou.

But when the vehicles hit the road, Neolix nearly died. At the end of 2018, slow fundraising progress put the company in crisis. During that period, Yu pitched frequently, meeting with 60 or 70 investors, but no one understood what he was trying to do. "When I went out in 2018, I had to spend two hours first explaining — explaining what Neolix is, what autonomous vehicles are, what a Neolix autonomous vehicle is. After listening, they'd shake their heads and leave."

The bigger question from investors was, "Road access will never be granted." Yu remembers one investor bluntly telling him, "You'll be lucky to sell 500 vehicles nationwide."

With fundraising going nowhere and the company's cash dwindling, Yu had no choice but to mortgage his property and take out bank loans. "My family was confused when they signed — they didn't know what I was actually doing."

During that time, Yu's mentality shifted. "It was loneliness. I couldn't sleep at night because you don't know if you're going the right way or the wrong way. If this is a track and you're the only company on it, you must be making some kind of mistake." Yu admits that this sense of loneliness only truly disappeared this year. "Now whether it's clients, government leaders, or partners — everyone sees it clearly."

In Chen Yu's view, early investors' concerns essentially boiled down to believing few people could pull this off. "Many institutions prioritize stability and have lots of complaints about projects — costs too high, no scalable use case found, can't get road access, no scientists on the team, and so on." But Chen believed these problems weren't insurmountable. What he valued was the company's full-stack capability: able to provide autonomous driving solutions while also having vehicle manufacturing capability, plus Yu's years of logistics experience. He felt it was worth taking a bet. Yunqi Capital led Neolix's Series A round in early 2019 and doubled down in subsequent A+ and B rounds.

Before 2019, Neolix's clients were mostly large companies with delivery or food delivery needs like Alibaba, Deppon, and Meituan. After 2019, Neolix gradually introduced campus retail, delivery services, and more.

In overseas markets, a May 2019 Bloomberg report on Neolix's mass production played a key role. Multiple companies came knocking, including Middle Eastern e-commerce platform Noon, which signed a 5,000-vehicle order with Neolix. More people began recognizing the sector. Neolix made it through its initial difficult period.

02 The Price

The money from the A+ round ran out in less than a year. To find more funding, Yu pitched constantly — two or three times a day, meeting with three to four hundred investment institutions over the course of 2020. "That's when I developed my PowerPoint skills," Yu said with a wry smile.

Cygnus Equity has been Neolix's long-term financial advisor since its Series B round. Cygnus Executive Director Jun Tong recalls that the afternoon they signed the service agreement, Yu scheduled an in-person meeting with him. To improve fundraising efficiency, they went through every point investors might challenge one by one — including how to tell the commercialization story, road access challenges, supply chain challenges, cost control, and more. This candid and efficient working style left a deep impression on him.

After the Series B fundraising kicked off, following a wave of intensive investor roadshows, the feedback was unanimous: the commercialization path wasn't clear. Tong realized that at that point, the key to breaking through the fundraising impasse was finding investors who recognized the long-term value of autonomous delivery vehicles.

Even existing shareholders wavered at one point. Yu mentions two details: first, he heard through various channels that several shareholders wanted to sell their stakes, though when he brought it up with them this year, "they shook their heads like rattles, saying they never said that, not a single cent of old shares could be sold"; second, an investor who had supported Yu for years revealed that he had once paid someone to read Yu's fortune, calculating whether he and the company would go under.

In August 2021, Neolix announced its Series B round, co-led by CICC Capital and SoftBank Asia Venture Capital, with existing shareholders Yunqi Capital and Yaotu Capital following on. In the view of some market observers, CICC Capital and SoftBank Asia were willing to lead because they are funds with a longer-term orientation, willing to bet on certain things.

Yu did have other options. An investor told China Entrepreneur that SoftBank Vision Fund wanted to invest in Neolix together with DiDi, with the condition of taking a controlling 51% stake. "Lao Yu was even brought to Masayoshi Son's house to talk, just waiting for him to nod." But Yu wanted to build an independent company, and after consideration, he refused.

After the Series B breakthrough, a shift in technical direction caused internal turmoil at Neolix.

In its early days, to compensate for technical shortcomings, Neolix had a strategic partnership with Baidu Apollo to develop L4 autonomous driving capabilities. After Transformer went open-source in 2021, Yu decided to follow Tesla's lead and switch to a vision-based approach, developing visual perception algorithms in-house.

The result in 2021 was internal conflict over the technical direction, with the company's CTO and a batch of technical staff leaving one after another. "Everyone who believed in LiDAR left."

Yu acknowledges that there was no right or wrong in people's choices, but from first principles, the vision-based solution was the most suitable perception approach for Neolix because of lower costs. "We're definitely looking for the solution with the most complex software, simplest hardware, and lowest cost — there's no second choice." Yu's goal is to be the Tesla of commercial vehicles.

Reflecting on this internal turmoil, Yu said, "You have to find people who share the same vision. I can tolerate any price for that, otherwise this endeavor is guaranteed to fail."

Afterward, Yu brought in a new CTO, Qiankun Miao, who had previously worked at Intel China Labs with over 10 years of R&D experience in software performance optimization. After joining, Miao spent three months building a new technical team. Yu also personally vets hiring for key positions. "The CTO handles the technical questions, I handle the direction questions. First, do you believe in logistics? Second, do you believe in vision? Third, what kind of person are you?"

After getting through the pain of the technical transition, in 2021 Neolix took a key step in commercialization, obtaining among the first autonomous delivery vehicle licenses in China and becoming the first RoboVan company to operate commercially on public roads, while releasing its first autonomous vehicle, the X3. By 2022, Neolix had expanded into logistics, retail, security, urban epidemic prevention, and other sectors, landing in 13 countries and 40 cities globally, with cumulative safe driving distance exceeding 6 million kilometers and cumulative deployed vehicles surpassing 1,000.

03 Building the Ant Army

After years in the logistics industry, Yu has developed a habit of running numbers and is exceptionally sensitive to figures. "All the top people in logistics are masters of numbers, because they have to instantly calculate where the interests lie."

Yu also frequently deals with "number fanatics" in the industry, such as ZTO Express Chairman Meisong Lai and SF Express Chairman Wei Wang. "They'll rattle off a string of numbers when talking to you. If you don't understand at a glance, they'll think you're not up to par, so I've been trained by them too."

In internal team communication, Yu particularly emphasizes digitization — technology needs metrics, marketing needs KPIs, sales needs unit numbers, finance needs cash flow and revenue figures, costs need reports. "Everything must be quantifiable."

At an internal meeting this year, he blew up and slammed the table because some costs hadn't been controlled well.

In Tong's view, companies like Neolix that do B2B business have an important prerequisite for clients moving from small-batch trials to large-scale procurement: the ability to help clients create value. "For example, reducing client costs, or helping clients improve efficiency, or both — the end result must be helping clients make money."

Data shows that in 2024, China's express delivery volume exceeded 170 billion pieces for the first time. Within this massive logistics network, last-mile "final five kilometers" delivery costs account for as much as 60%, becoming a "black hole" swallowing industry profits. But the room to reduce costs through greater organizational efficiency is limited, making autonomous vehicles a new productivity tool for lowering logistics transportation costs.

Yu has done the math. If an autonomous vehicle covers about 10 kilometers from a distribution center to a station, delivering 1,500 packages a day, the transportation cost per package is roughly 0.06 yuan — a 0.09 yuan reduction from the current 0.15 yuan. Based on 170 billion pieces, autonomous vehicles could save the industry 15.3 billion yuan annually. There are two reasons for the cost reduction: first, no driver, so no labor cost; second, greater cargo capacity. Yu gives the example that the X6 model increases loading space by 50% under the same vehicle class conditions.

Beyond automated transportation, Yu also wants to solve automated loading and unloading. Because these two segments each account for half the cost, otherwise it's hard to drive costs down.

In October 2023, Yu took more than 70 R&D staff to Wujiang, running with the autonomous vehicles through the night, sleeping at the transfer hub for three months, to develop a new product that Yu describes as a "land container." It can be placed beneath the automated sorting chutes at distribution centers or transfer hubs, loading packages 24 hours a day. When full, an autonomous vehicle pulls it away and automatically unloads it at stations or store entrances.

Yu mentions that the first and second generation products were particularly noisy. "At 3 a.m., when we ran it to unload under an old lady's building, she came down with a shovel to hit me. We gritted our teeth and got the noise below 60 decibels. Later, when we unloaded under her building again, she didn't even know."

In Yu's view, "the first principle of logistics is cost reduction," so the company's sole mission is to reduce costs for clients. "Push ourselves to the extreme, push the industry to the extreme, push costs to the extreme — save money for ourselves, create profits for partners."

Currently, Neolix mainly uses a vehicle sales plus AI service fee model, with clients able to lease vehicles and services as needed. For major clients, the company provides customized operational service solutions.

Yu divides the autonomous delivery vehicle business model into two phases: Phase one is vehicle sales or leasing plus service provision; phase two is forming a mobility platform providing transportation services. "I'm not building smart drivers, I'm building an ant army — using low-cost methods to construct a sufficiently massive, rule-abiding, 24-hour safe-driving fleet of hundreds of thousands or even millions of vehicles."

Neolix is currently transitioning toward phase two. Yu hopes the company can eventually become an autonomous vehicle version of Lalamove or DiDi Freight.

This goal won't be easy to achieve. Tong believes Neolix must have four capabilities: sufficiently advanced technology; stable supply chain capability; understanding of client scenarios and client relationships; and the ability to secure road access.

As delivery scale rapidly expands, the company is also encountering many new problems — safe operations capability, management capability, technology generalization capability... every day brings new challenges. Yu believes this places higher demands on organizational capability. "Now not only is the speed of attracting talent increasing tenfold, but organizational capability building is also iterating tenfold." But what worries him most is organization-related. "Organizational capability building cannot go wrong. Once you get the DNA wrong, a malformed organization grows."

Yu believes the company is still in the 0-to-1 phase. Only when national deployment exceeds 10,000 autonomous delivery vehicles by year-end will Neolix truly achieve its 0-to-1 breakthrough. "This is a strategic-level victory."

As the company's leader, Yu is both excited and concerned. He describes his management style as leading from the front, which works well in the 0-to-1 phase. But in the 1-to-10 phase, complexity will exceed individual processing capacity. "So I also have to evolve, from leading from the front to building the organization as a product." This evolution, Yu believes, will be the "deciding move" that determines the company's fate.