Yunqi Capital Quarterly | Spring Winds Ask Nothing of the Traveler; We Chart Our Own Course
A Closer Look at Yunqi Capital's Recent Moves
Spring winds break the ice, and the first shoots of 2025 are already peeking through the melting snow.
In Q1 just past, DeepSeek's explosive breakout demonstrated new breakthroughs in AI technology and catalyzed widespread adoption of AI applications. Amid these new advances and challenges, we worked alongside our portfolio companies to seize emerging opportunities, leaving fresh marks of growth across fundraising, business operations, and ecosystem partnerships.
Before summer arrives, we share our recent harvest and growth with you. We sow belief together, and wait quietly for the blossoms.
Fundraising Updates
IPO Developments
Zhaogang Group: Successfully Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
On March 10, Yunqi Capital portfolio company and China's largest steel e-commerce platform operator Zhaogang Group officially began trading on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, stock code 06676. Founded in 2012, Zhaogang Group currently operates the world's largest third-party steel trading platform, with over 623,000 SKUs available for sale, connecting approximately 15,000 registered sellers and more than 180,000 registered buyers.
Manycore Tech Files Listing Application with Hong Kong Stock Exchange
On February 14, Yunqi Capital portfolio company and one of the "Hangzhou Six Little Dragons" Manycore Tech formally submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Founded in 2011, Manycore Tech specializes in spatial design services, with products including Kujiale. By 2023 average monthly active users (MAU), it is the world's largest spatial design platform; by 2023 revenue, it is also China's largest spatial design software provider, accounting for approximately 22.2% market share.
In 2013, Yunqi Capital founding partner Chengyu Mao (then an investor at IDG) became Manycore Tech's first institutional investor. After Yunqi Capital's establishment, it participated in the company's Series B and three subsequent funding rounds, with cumulative investment approaching $10 million, accompanying the company's growth throughout.
JD.com Industrial Files Listing Application with Hong Kong Stock Exchange
On March 30, Yunqi Capital portfolio company JD.com Industrial submitted its listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As an industrial supply chain technology and service provider, JD.com Industrial offers extensive industrial product supply and intelligent supply chain services through "Taipu," an end-to-end intelligent industrial supply chain solution combining "digital" (intelligence) and "physical" (goods). As of December 31, 2024, it had provided approximately 57.1 million SKUs across 77 product categories.
New Investments
A2Square: Raised Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Pre-A+ Round
#Embodied Intelligence
Yunqi Capital, along with Dunhong Assets, SDIC Chuangying, and other financial and industrial funds, participated in this round. A2Square is among the earliest Chinese companies to commit to an "end-to-end" technical paradigm, and one of the first to achieve breakthroughs in critical VLA areas. Its RoboMamba end-to-end embodied large model for manipulation robots, launched in June 2024, leads the industry in both application timing and generalization capability. This round of funding will primarily accelerate continuous iteration of its end-to-end VLA model and scaled commercial deployment of embodied intelligent robots.
Noematrix: Completed Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Pre-A++ Round
#Embodied Intelligence
In addition to Yunqi Capital, this round attracted several renowned investment institutions including Shengyu Investment, Tsing Capital, Jiayu Capital, and Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Group. The new funding will further accelerate Noematrix's breakthroughs in embodied intelligence foundation models, data collection and evaluation, and drive its commercial application exploration in retail fulfillment, home services, food processing, and other scenarios.
Aiper: Completed Nearly 1 Billion RMB Strategic Financing
#Wireless Pool Cleaning Robots
Global pool industry giant Fluidra made a strategic investment in Aiper, with Yunqi Capital joining as a new investor in this round. As a leader in the smart pool robot track, Aiper has achieved #1 sales volume market share on Amazon in the US, European, and Australian markets since 2023, and entered over 7,000 mainstream key account stores across Europe and America. This partnership with Fluidra opens a new engine for accessing global pool professional channels.
Follow-on Rounds
Astribot: Consecutively Completed Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Series A and A+ Rounds
#Embodied Intelligence
The new funding was led by Jinqiu Fund and Ant Group, with Yunqi Capital continuing to support as an existing shareholder. The Astribot S1 has now undergone three iterations, delivering more powerful and stable dexterous operation capabilities, and is continuously landing practical implementations with leading universities, enterprises, and data centers.
Neolix: Completed 1 Billion RMB in Series C+ Round
#Intelligent Delivery
This round was jointly supported by multiple logistics giants and financial investors including CICC Capital, with Yunqi Capital partner Cygnus Equity serving as long-term financial advisor. The funding will help Neolix further iterate its end-to-end autonomous driving model capabilities and enhance its delivery and deployment capabilities across more logistics scenarios.
Yitu Technology: Completed Pre-A Round
#Large Models in Vehicles
This round was led by Xuhui Capital, with Dening Capital participating, and Yunqi Capital following on from its angel round investment. Funds will be primarily directed toward R&D of automotive vertical large models and intelligent cockpit AIOS systems, driving mass production project batch delivery, and leading the commercialization of full-stack in-vehicle AI capabilities.
Vicomi Semiconductor: Completed Tens of Millions of RMB in A+ Round
#Advanced Intelligent Manufacturing
This round was jointly invested by Jinyu Maowu, Optics Valley Semiconductor Industrial Investment, and Saina Capital. Funds will be used for company R&D, market expansion, and team expansion and building.
Portfolio Growth
New AI advances, new partnerships, new global breakthroughs — our portfolio companies' growth stories continue to unfold.
AI Advances
I. AGI + New Trends
MiniMax: Released Open-Source Model, Hailuo AI Tops Global Video Generation Apps by MAU
On January 15, Yunqi Capital angel-round project and leading domestic large model startup MiniMax released and open-sourced its MiniMax-01 new model series, comprising two models: the foundational language large model MiniMax-Text-01 and the visual multimodal large model MiniMax-VL-01.
On the global AI application monthly ranking published by Silicon Valley powerhouse a16z, MiniMax's product Hailuo AI ranked first in its category, topping the video generation track with 16.35 million monthly active users, surpassing OpenAI's Sora (8.5 million) and Kuaishou's Keling AI (6.2 million).
Multiple Portfolio Companies Actively Integrate DeepSeek
In February 2025, DeepSeek reshaped perceptions of large models with its high performance and cost efficiency. Multiple Yunqi Capital portfolio companies actively integrated it, immediately exploring new possibilities that efficient inference models offered for internal productivity gains and product iteration.
Yue Dian Technology: Knora-AI integrated DeepSeek-R1, significantly enhancing enterprise-grade AI reasoning capabilities and building a smarter engine that better understands enterprises.
WeLinking Technology: Xiaowei AI Creation integrated DeepSeek, helping enterprise clients rapidly output high-quality content better aligned with brand tone.
ZhenZero Technology: ZhenZero Yinuo AI flagship edition introduced deep-thinking large models, creating more intelligent contract management.
Worldwide Logistics: Digital employee system integrated DeepSeek, with AI intelligent quotation service going live to serve international logistics more efficiently.
Zilliz: DeepSeek + Milvus + Anything LLM, launching the "optimal solution" for local knowledge base deployment
Manycore Tech: Open-Sources Spatial Understanding Model SpatialLM
Empowering Embodied Intelligence Training
During GTC 2025, Manycore Tech announced the open-sourcing of SpatialLM, a spatial understanding model that generates physically correct 3D scene layouts from just a video clip. Unlike traditional large language models, SpatialLM breaks through limitations in understanding geometric and spatial relationships in the physical world, endowing machines with human-like spatial cognition and parsing capabilities. SpatialLM is now open-sourced globally for developers on HuggingFace, GitHub, and ModelScope.
Keenon Robotics: Launches First Humanoid Service Robot "XMAN-R1"
To meet more complex demands in the service industry, Keenon Robotics formally launched XMAN-R1, a "service-born" humanoid embodied service robot, based on its massive accumulation of real-world scenario data, building a multi-form embodied service robot collaborative ecosystem. XMAN-R1 adopts a design philosophy of "role-specific, approachable, safe," adapted to the service industry scenarios that Keenon has deeply cultivated, having already completed long-task closed loops within service scenarios including "ordering — food preparation — delivery — collection," and will explore more scenarios in the future.
Astribot: Releases VR Teleoperation Video
Recently Astribot demonstrated its AI robot product Astribot's VR teleoperation capabilities on its official video channel. This function can be used for AI training, with advantages including ultra-low latency motion synchronization, 2 seconds per pick-and-place operation, 500+ effective samples per hour of continuous operation; and ultra-efficient data collection, 5x+ training efficiency compared to alternatives.
• Business Partnerships
DeepRoute.ai: Partners with Qualcomm to Release Advanced Intelligent Driving Solution Based on Snapdragon Ride Platform
This solution will cover both LiDAR and pure vision approaches, both supporting advanced intelligent driving functions including urban NOA (Navigate on Autopilot), highway NOA, and automatic parking, adaptable to both fuel and new energy vehicles, meeting global automakers' personalized needs for different models. Through this technical cooperation, both parties will also optimize end-to-end (E2E) bird's-eye view (BEV) and Transformer AI models based on the Snapdragon Ride platform.
Neolix: Reaches Strategic Partnership with RoboSense
Both parties will deeply collaborate around the needs for all-weather, all-time, all-scenario operation of unmanned vehicles in the logistics field, creating an industry-leading unmanned delivery solution, jointly enhancing unmanned vehicles' precise operation capabilities in complex scenarios and diverse environments, satisfying various professional delivery scenarios including express hub transfer and supermarket distribution, accelerating the普及 of unmanned delivery technology, and making unmanned vehicles truly become infrastructure for smart cities.
Windrose Technology: Partners with TELD to Expand Global Heavy-Duty Truck Charging Network
Both parties will first achieve pure electric heavy-duty truck operations on core freight logistics trunk routes including Beijing-Shanghai, Shanghai-Guangzhou, and Beijing-Guangzhou based on customer operating routes, providing brand cargo owners and logistics carriers with clean, efficient, low-cost zero-emission transportation solutions. Cooperation will simultaneously land in China, Europe, Australia, and other regions, jointly expanding in-depth cooperation in global charging and energy replenishment networks, microgrids, and other areas, promoting global zero-emission freight transportation and efficient energy network operations.
Plasim Technology: Signs with Top Packaging House
Mass Transfer Technology's First Scaled Application in IC Packaging
After half a year of testing, Plasim Technology and a top packaging house reached a strategic cooperation agreement on its mass transfer fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) equipment XBonder Pro, initiating a new upgrade in wafer-level packaging and panel-level packaging. Plasim is also cooperating with a globally leading packaging house and a globally leading power device company on XBonder Pro's application in wafer-level packaging.
Sobot: Reaches Strategic Partnership with Shouhoubao
Advancing "Intelligent Manufacturing" Full-Process Service Closed Loop
Both parties integrate advantageous resources to jointly launch the "Intelligent Manufacturing Integrated Service Solution," focusing on deep integration and innovation across the full intelligent manufacturing service process,打通 the service closed loop from "customer connection — service delivery — continuous operation," helping manufacturing enterprises upgrade services, enhance service innovation value, build new infrastructure for intelligent manufacturing services, and jointly推动 Chinese intelligent manufacturing enterprises' competitiveness to new heights in global markets.
• Global Expansion
Keenon Robotics: Thailand's First Smart Hotel Opens
On February 20, 2025, Chiang Mai's Furama Hotel partnered with global service robot leader Keenon Robotics to successfully transform into Thailand's first hotel deeply integrated with intelligent technology. Keenon's T10, W3, S100, and C30 robot products will be deployed at this hotel.
Windrose 670km Long-Range Pure Electric Heavy-Duty Truck Enters Danish Market
In 2024 testing, Windrose Technology's long-range pure electric heavy-duty truck innovatively completed double-trailer towing tests, a global first for pure electric heavy-duty trucks completing 500km long-distance + 64-ton double-trailer freight transport. The test ran from Denmark's capital Copenhagen to and from its second-largest city Aarhus, totaling over 590km, fully loaded at 64 tons, with actual range exceeding 500km, creating the longest range record for a pure electric heavy-duty truck with double-trailer full load on a single charge.
Triastek: T20G Receives FDA IND Approval
Triastek's T20G is a modified novel oral anticoagulant for reducing stroke and systemic embolism risk in non-valvular atrial fibrillation patients, with Triastek holding global development and commercialization rights. This product previously received clinical trial application (IND) approval from China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) in January 2024.
XTransfer: Partners with Major African Multinational Bank, Launches New Global Collection and Payment Account
In February, XTransfer announced a memorandum of understanding with Ecobank, one of Africa's largest multinational banks. Both parties will collaborate to provide quality cross-border financial and risk control services for African small, medium, and micro trade enterprises.
Additionally, XTransfer partnered with HSBC to provide "one-stop global collection and payment accounts" for companies registered in Hong Kong and mainland China. The accounts support six major currencies: RMB, USD, HKD, EUR, GBP, and SGD.
Ecosystem Co-Creation
Deep connections with upstream and downstream entrepreneurs and industry stakeholders across technology tracks.
Yunqi Capital X Shanghai Jiao Tong University Industrial Research Institute:
Seeking Next-Gen Agent Entrepreneurs
On April 10, Yunqi Capital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Industrial Research Institute jointly hosted the closed-door exchange event "What's Next: Seeking Next-Gen AI Entrepreneurs," engaging in in-depth discussions on new entrepreneurial opportunities in the Agentic AI ecosystem with dozens of entrepreneurs with "zero-to-one" pioneering experience.
Podcast Conversations with Frontline Entrepreneurs:
Deep Analysis of Tech and VC Hot Topics
Shortly after the Spring Festival holiday began, Yunqi Capital investors joined Xiao Han (Founder & CEO of Jina AI) and Shaun (Co-founder & CEO of Heyriva) for a lively discussion on DeepSeek's industry impact on Yunqi Capital's branded podcast "Attent!on."
Pan Li, Co-founder and CMO of Yitu Technology, and a Yunqi Capital investor jointly analyzed the technical evolution, advanced pain points, industry landscape, and future trends of large models in vehicles on the Yunqi Capital branded podcast "Attent!on" channel.
Yunqi Capital Portfolio x CES 2025
As the annual "Spring Festival Gala of Technology," CES 2025 saw a significant presence of Chinese innovative forces, with Chinese exhibitors accounting for over 30%. Multiple Yunqi Capital portfolio companies with notable innovative breakthroughs in AI hardware, including RealMan Robotics, Hohem, and Aiper, deeply participated in this technology extravaganza.
04 Yunqi Capital Honors
Portfolio Honors
Selected highlights
MiniMax, Triastek, and DeepRoute.ai selected for "ChinaVenture 2024 Annual Sharp Companies List"
Keenon Robotics and Aiper products received 2025 German iF Design Award
Zhijin Technology received Shanghai's first batch of "Industrial Empowerment Chain Master" enterprise designation
IceKredit received AIGC-Enabled Industry Innovation Leader · Finance TOP20
Yunqi Capital Awards
Selected highlights
Top Early-Stage Investment Institutions
CVCRI China Venture Capital Research Institute
- 2024 "China's Most Influential Early-Stage Investment Institutions TOP30"
Qimingpian
- 2024 "Best Early-Stage Investment Institutions Active List TOP20"
- 2024 "Best Early-Stage Investment Institutions Comprehensive List TOP30"
ChinaVenture
- 2024 "China's Early-Stage Investment Institutions TOP20"
Artificial Intelligence
Qimingpian
- 2024 "Artificial Intelligence Sector Investment Institutions TOP15"
IPO Zao Zhi Dao
- 2023-2024 Best Artificial Intelligence Investment Institution
Top Investors
Qimingpian
- Chengyu Mao: 2024 "China's Best Investors TOP100"
