Saifeng Technology Raises Tens of Millions of RMB, FreeS Fund Continues to Follow On | FreeS Fund Deal News
Embrace the Asset Management 2.0 Era
Recently, Saifeng Technology announced that it has raised tens of millions of RMB from United Capital, with FreeS Fund — its angel-round investor — participating in the follow-on round.
Founded in July 2016, Saifeng Technology provides institutional investors with intelligent portfolio management, investment research, and professional trading solutions, helping asset managers improve investment performance and better manage risk. To date, the company has acquired dozens of tier-one clients across securities, futures, trust, public fund, and private fund institutions that serve as industry benchmarks.
What the Investors Say
Zhiyuan Zhao, Vice President at FreeS Fund
Email: zzy@freesvc.com
We remain firmly bullish on the long-term trend toward institutionalization in China's secondary capital markets, and we are committed to making substantial bets on enterprise services for asset managers. Since its founding, Saifeng Technology has assembled a team with exceptionally professional and well-rounded backgrounds in a short period of time, demonstrating deep understanding of both fintech and artificial intelligence. Saifeng's investment analysis and trade execution capabilities earned recognition from well-known, tier-one professional institutions early in its life. The team possesses profound market insight and keeps pace with new developments and emerging trends. We believe the systems Saifeng provides can better help institutional investors process information and execute trades, and we trust the Saifeng team will be able to serve a growing base of institutional clients with these needs.
Saifeng Technology Raises Tens of Millions from United Capital to Build Out Intelligent Asset Management Services
Source: PEDaily
On May 21, Saifeng Technology announced that it has raised tens of millions of RMB in a round led by United Capital, with FreeS Fund participating. The proceeds will be used for headcount expansion, data infrastructure, and market development.
Founded in July 2016, Saifeng Technology combines three core strengths — financial engineering expertise, massive data processing capabilities, and artificial intelligence — to provide institutional investors with intelligent portfolio management, investment research, and professional trading solutions. The company helps asset managers improve investment performance and better manage risk, effectively empowering them in their operations. It previously raised its seed round from FreeS Fund.
Saifeng's founding team hails from top-tier international financial institutions and technology companies including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Google, AQR, UBS, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Facebook. Founder Hao Wang previously worked at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and has deep familiarity with the industry's pain points and needs.
Wang noted: "The Asset Management 2.0 era has arrived. Asset managers are demanding more from fintech, particularly in portfolio management and trade execution. For example, they want to combine holdings data with various market data sources and exponentially growing alternative data to conduct real-time monitoring and intelligent analytical research on their portfolios. For trade execution, they also want to achieve intelligent management through technology for algorithmic trading, arbitrage modules, and real-time risk control during order placement."
On the investment management front, as institutions manage growing numbers of products, data tends to be scattered across various systems with inconsistent storage formats and heavy mixes of unstructured data. This makes data difficult to manage and utilize, and even harder to combine with real-time holdings for research analysis and alerts — placing greater demands on technology. Saifeng's investment analysis system addresses this problem by helping clients achieve centralized data management and utilization, enabling real-time, cross-system, multi-account, multi-strategy, multi-asset-class portfolio analysis, risk monitoring, and trade management. This provides a reliable foundation for sound decision-making and significantly improves the speed and quality of information processing for portfolio managers.
On the trade execution front, Saifeng's trading system features advanced algorithmic trading capabilities developed using AI technology, helping institutional investors achieve intelligent order execution. By incorporating equity market microstructure analysis to execute dispersed trades at optimal times, the system reduces market friction, effectively lowers transaction impact costs, and ensures execution at the best possible prices — thereby enhancing fund performance. At the same time, the system automates trade risk control execution steps, freeing traders from burdensome manual operations. With the system's powerful processing capabilities, traders need only monitor the system.
According to the company, Saifeng Technology currently serves dozens of tier-one clients across securities, futures, trust, public fund, and private fund institutions that serve as industry benchmarks. "Going forward, Saifeng will continue to deepen its presence in the asset management industry, combining AI and big data technologies with financial engineering methods that have been repeatedly validated in mature overseas markets, to provide institutional investors with scientific, real-time, professional asset management services for optimal investment decisions. As China's institutional asset management scale continues to grow and financial markets open to overseas competition under an increasingly intense competitive environment, improving asset management capabilities by combining the latest AI technology with exponentially growing massive data processing power represents the inevitable direction for this industry. We are extremely bullish on the intelligent asset management track."
When asked about the recent news of Wall Street traders being massively replaced by machines, Wang — a former Goldman Sachs employee — responded: "In asset management, three groups play the most central roles: those responsible for raising capital, similar to wealth management; those responsible for managing money, meaning investment management; and those responsible for providing market liquidity, namely broker-dealers or banks. The news about traders being replaced by machines was more relevant to the trade execution departments at liquidity-providing broker-dealers. But as AI technology develops and the scale of internal and external data that needs to be processed explodes, machines will play an increasingly significant role — both currently and going forward — across every segment of asset management."
With the new asset management regulations now in effect, the rules of the game have changed substantially, presenting greater challenges to investment institutions' operational capabilities and risk control. Future market position will need to be supported by investment performance. To gain competitive advantage, investment institutions must rapidly enhance their active management capabilities.
