5Y News | Intelligent Decision-Making Tech Firm UHL Secures Nearly 100 Million RMB Funding Round to Accelerate Enterprise Digital Transformation

UHAlean, a leader in commercial intelligent decision-making, recently announced it has raised nearly RMB 100 million in funding, led by 5Y Capital, with participation from SAIC Hengxu, Binfu Capital, and Zhongnan Capital.

This round of funding will further strengthen UHAlean's technical advantages in operations research optimization and its recruitment of top-tier operations research talent. The company will continue to deepen its focus on this vertical, refining its algorithms, products, and service systems, accelerating the commercial deployment of intelligent decision-making solutions, enhancing its operational depth and scalability, and further expanding its lead in the industry.

Fangfang Xiao

Founder, UHAlean

Q1

What motivated you to start this company?

Fangfang Xiao: It began with an urgent request from an airline for automated, intelligent crew scheduling. Even with schedulers pulling all-nighters, the airline couldn't cover all its flights with existing cabin crew, and the pressure on the relevant departments was immense. Domestic vendors capable of providing this service were extremely scarce. The airline had reached out to many suppliers, none of whom could solve the problem. By chance, our "OR (Operations Research) + AI (Artificial Intelligence)" technology resolved the airline's practical difficulties and delivered outstanding results.

At that moment, I realized that through technology deployment, we could generate social value measured in hundreds of millions of yuan, while also dramatically relieving people's work stress. That was deeply fulfilling, and it became the core motivation for starting the company.

From there, our team conducted extensive research and customer interviews. At the time, general awareness of operations research and reinforcement learning was still limited, but customers consistently expressed strong recognition of intelligent decision optimization. The technical capabilities we possessed represented a common need for both present and future development, and the market lacked suppliers who could deliver this capability and service. Our assessment was that the industry was in its infancy around 2015–2016, at the budding stage of market emergence — the right time to enter.

Q2

Why did you choose 5Y Capital's investment?

Fangfang Xiao: 5Y Capital has a distinctly long-term orientation, focusing more on the practical application of AI technology and the industry's long-term development trajectory. Our team believes that using models and algorithms to replace or assist human decision-making is an inevitable trend that will reshape future industrial structures. Having shareholders with long-term vision and broader perspective provides better entrepreneurial guidance and supports us in achieving our goals — that's what makes 5Y Capital most attractive. Communication with 5Y Capital has been remarkably simple and efficient. Their feedback on our strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement has been sincere and direct. Their ability to make decisions and move quickly, responding at all hours, demonstrates both professionalism and dedication.

Yunfeng Shi

Investment Manager, 5Y Capital

Q1

Why did you invest in UHAlean?

Yunfeng Shi: Rapid breakthroughs in reinforcement learning are continually encroaching on classical operations research optimization scenarios, and the combination of the two has created new possibilities across multiple domains. As a rare domestic company mastering intelligent decision-making technology, UHAlean chose to enter through the most challenging aviation sector first, earning high recognition from leading airlines and supply chain enterprises. We look forward to UHAlean leveraging new technical variables to help enterprises continuously make high-quality, data-driven decisions in their production and operations.

Q2

What impressed you most about UHAlean's team and founder?

Yunfeng Shi: UHAlean is a startup team with a strong geek ethos. CEO Fangfang Xiao embodies not only the rigorous rationality of a scientist but also exceptional entrepreneurial drive — unwavering in her conviction about the long-term value of intelligent decision-making, and bold in exploration. At critical junctures in the company's development, she has consistently chosen the more challenging path. I deeply admire her courage and determination.

Founded in 2016, UHAlean has remained focused on using operations research (OR), artificial intelligence, and big data technologies to address complex business needs at massive data scale, delivering "Industry + AI + OR" intelligent decision-making solutions to customers.

Founder Fangfang Xiao holds a PhD from Georgia Tech, where she studied under Ellis Johnson, recipient of the highest honor in operations research, the John von Neumann Theory Prize. The core team brings together elite talent with distinguished achievements in operations research optimization and AI decision-making. Algorithm team members have backgrounds from Georgia Tech's world-class operations research program and extensive high-quality implementation experience. Currently, UHAlean provides intelligent decision-making services to the aviation, logistics, retail, and manufacturing sectors.

As China's national big data strategy accelerates, massive data generation has become a new asset for enterprise development. How to leverage this data and realize its value has become a new imperative for building competitive advantage. In rapidly changing market environments, processing existing data assets through "AI + OR" technology to help enterprises make optimal decisions quickly and capture maximum benefit represents the maximization of data asset commercial value.

UHAlean believes that data-driven intelligent decision-making is an inevitable trend for future enterprise development, and intelligent decision-making will reshape core enterprise competitiveness.

First, intelligent decision-making can activate accumulated enterprise data, improving decision precision and foresight. At present, data-, algorithm-, technology-, and scenario-driven intelligent decision-making has already achieved rapid processing of learning, decision-making, and action, with continuous iteration and optimization. UHAlean believes that in traditional manufacturing, business scenarios depend partly on rules and partly on employee experience and accumulated practice. Machines can cycle through human historical experience and accumulated practice in continuous "experiment — validate — learn" loops, thereby making forward-looking decisions.

Second, intelligent decision-making can provide deeper business insight in enterprise management. Intelligent decision-making does not mean all decisions are fully automated — that would eliminate human agency. Rather, it focuses on tactical and operational levels, providing intelligent, rapid, and precise decision strategies.

Finally, intelligent decision-making improves decision quality and efficiency while reducing human operational error. Faced with massive information, human natural intelligence alone is insufficient. Computers process, communicate, and compute in parallel and linear modes faster than humans. Moreover, intelligent decision-making can discover more essential patterns from vast, complex, and disordered individual data, and derive optimal decision schemes from hundreds of millions of possible outcomes.

Precisely because it recognized the persistent pain points of enterprise decision-making and the enormous value of intelligent decision-making, UHAlean entered the intelligent decision-making vertical through operations research optimization.

Intelligent decision-making is fundamentally about optimizing decision quality and speed, and the combination of data science with top-tier operations research theory provides a solid foundation for achieving optimized decisions. As a technology-driven company, UHAlean engages at the enterprise decision-making level through data, operations research optimization algorithms, and specific decision scenarios. Based on continuous iterative推演 of data science, it outputs optimal decision results, solves complex decision problems in massive data environments, changes the way enterprise management sets strategy based on experience judgment, and empowers enterprises and industries to become digital and intelligent, further enhancing commercial efficiency.

UHAlean initially broke through with intelligent decision-making in aviation, then gradually extended its operations research optimization advantages to logistics, retail, intelligent manufacturing, and supply chain. In terms of business deployment, UHAlean serves numerous leading enterprises and industry benchmark clients, including China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Haier, Danone, Bosch Huayu, and PetroChina.

Today, enterprises are undergoing profound digital transformation. Every enterprise should have an intelligent decision-making nervous system, and intelligent decision-making will experience explosive growth in the future. With this funding round, UHAlean will continue strengthening its top-tier technical talent and R&D deployment capabilities in operations research optimization, exploring product matrices for more business scenarios, building a moat of capital + technology + products, launching killer products in the commercial intelligent decision-making track, and becoming a disruptor in this vertical.

5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately US$3 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe the world becomes a better place when the crazy you that others see starts to be believed.

BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG

WWW.5YCAP.COM