BlueRun Ventures Quarterly Investment & Funding Roundup | 2022 Q4

Every quarter, we round up new funding developments from BlueRun Ventures' portfolio companies.

In Q4 2022, the BlueRun family recorded 9 publicly disclosed funding events, spanning biotech, enterprise software, hard tech, and new energy. Among these, 4 were new investments and 5 were follow-on rounds.

If you're interested in any of these projects or want to join their teams, feel free to reach out via email: china@brv.com.cn

New Investments

Biotech Company

Lidatox Completes Nearly $6 Million Pre-A Round

Led by BlueRun Ventures

Company Profile: Incubated by Ningbo University's New Drug Technology Research Institute, Lidatox has grown over four years into a 60-plus-person team combining chemistry, biology, and automation. Lidatox has built a proprietary platform based on photoaffinity labeling chemoproteomics (PAL-AfBPP), which has already collaborated with multiple academic institutions and drug R&D companies, achieving notable successes.

BlueRun's Take: In recent years, hot drug targets have become crowded and fiercely competitive. Yet over 90% of human protein targets remain undruggable — developing high-quality drugs against these "undruggable" targets is where pharmaceutical companies are racing to win. Chemoproteomics uses disease-relevant cellular models or tissue as experimental systems to screen drug candidates against protein targets in living cells. We expect Lidatox to leverage its next-generation, highly automated chemoproteomics platform to find drugs for highly validated, challenging targets, while continuously generating high-value data on small molecule-protein interactions in living cells — providing core support for critical drug discovery stages.

Ophthalmic AR/VR Medical Device Company

RuiShi Technology Completes 50 Million RMB Series A

Led by BlueRun Ventures

Company Profile: Founded in 2017, RuiShi Technology has been deeply focused on myopia prevention and control for children and adolescents. Under the leadership of Chief Scientist Professor Ningli Wang (CPPCC National Committee member, Academician of the International Academy of Ophthalmology, former President of the Chinese Ophthalmological Society) and Chief Optical Advisor Professor Yongtian Wang (CPPCC National Committee member, Distinguished Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology School of Optoelectronics, Director of Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display), RuiShi launched its core product: the myopia prevention and control far-image screen. In deep collaboration with Beijing Tongren Hospital and the National Engineering Research Center of Ophthalmology, the company combines top-tier medical expertise with cutting-edge optical technology to create a powerful tool for myopia prevention that transforms how children and adolescents read.

BlueRun's Take: In recent years, myopia among youth has become a pressing social issue. We're pleased to see the RuiShi team innovatively applying AR optical technology to clinical ophthalmology and launching their original far-image screen product. Within six months of launch, it has received widespread praise from professional ophthalmologists and parents of myopic children. Looking ahead, we expect the company to continue building on its core technology platform in myopia prevention and treatment, launching more excellent products and bringing hope to more families dealing with myopia.

AI Green Computing Company

BreezeML Completes $4 Million Seed Round

Led by BlueRun Ventures

Company Profile: Founded in April 2022 in Los Angeles, BreezeML was established by co-founders Professor Guoqing Xu of UCLA and Professor Ravi Netravali of Princeton University. Their R&D team channels years of accumulated software systems and cloud computing expertise into BreezeML's products. By optimizing resource management at the bottom of the software stack, the company dramatically improves data center resource utilization, reducing the cost and technical barriers to productizing AI.

BlueRun's Take: AI is the most anticipated enterprise technology since cloud computing. It not only improves operational efficiency but also enables generational leaps in AI-first product experiences and efficiency. However, AI model training and inference consume massive computing resources, requiring companies to invest millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain and operate AI infrastructure. BreezeML's two founders are computer science professors at top U.S. universities, and the initial results and value of their research commercialization have already been recognized by major cloud providers and other enterprises. BlueRun Ventures is honored to be BreezeML's first investor, believing that the world-class products and services the team is building — with the mission of democratizing AI value — can realize the dream of making AI accessible to every enterprise.

AR Company

Thin Red Line Completes $50 Million Angel Round

BlueRun Ventures participated as a co-investor

Company Profile: Thin Red Line (细红线科技) was founded in June 2022 as Yonghao Luo's new venture, dedicated to building the next-generation personal computing device platform after smartphones. According to the company's website, it offers "a direct opportunity to participate in a platform-level revolution."

BlueRun's Take: BlueRun Ventures has been deeply investing across the XR industry chain and next-generation internet applications. We have high expectations for the Thin Red Line team to define a new "Always on" human-computer interaction experience and elevate users' ability to express themselves and solve problems in a future 3D interactive world through a general-purpose AR product. The next-generation internet represents a new mother ecosystem that will drive the development of related industries in China and, in turn, advance China's technological capabilities. Through our investment, we hope to help give rise to hardware, infrastructure, and ecosystems that represent China, enabling Chinese industry chains and technology to achieve global leadership.

Follow-on Funding Events

Heterogeneous Big Data Analytics Engine Company

Yanhuang Data Completes Over 100 Million RMB A1 and A1+ Rounds

BlueRun Ventures led its Pre-A round and participated in its A1 round

Company Profile: Shanghai Yanhuang Data Technology Co. focuses on building a proprietary big data processing platform, providing end-to-end services from data collection, ingestion, indexing, and search to data visualization and alerting — helping customers more quickly identify issues and develop solutions from massive datasets, enabling better digital transformation in this new information age. Yanhuang Data's platform serves finance, banking, healthcare, transportation, information security, IT operations, smart cities, IoT services, and more.

BlueRun's Take: As an early investor in Yanhuang Data, BlueRun Ventures is honored to witness the company's growth. After more than a year of development, the product's functionality and performance have been validated in initial PoCs with major customers. Yanhuang Data's cloud-native architecture and "schema-on-read" technology significantly lower the barriers to enterprise data preparation and management, earning recognition from customers. The company is accelerating ecosystem partnerships and commercial deployment. We believe technology-driven Yanhuang Data will become an outstanding commercial company through its independently controllable big data products.

Ultra-Low Altitude · Integrated Air-Ground Operator

YunSheng Intelligence Completes Hundreds of Millions RMB Series C

BlueRun Ventures led its Series A and participated in its Series B and B+ rounds

Company Profile: YunSheng Intelligence is an AI-centric company leveraging 4D real-scene mapping, industrial drones, fully automated airports, ground robots, and IoT cloud platforms, integrating multi-source sensors to provide industry users with "aircraft-network-cloud" integrated system solutions. It provides air-ground linked 4D holographic management platforms for power, oil & gas, emergency rescue, smart cities, and other sectors — a national-level "Little Giant" specialized and innovative enterprise. Its core team comprises PhDs and masters from Peking University, Tsinghua University, Tianjin University, University of Science and Technology of China, Nankai University, Cambridge, and other prestigious institutions, as well as talent from the Fifth and Ninth Academies of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, Huawei, and Tsinghua Unigroup.

Full-Stack Autonomous Driving Solution Provider

Machenike Completes Hundreds of Millions RMB Series B

BlueRun Ventures led its Pre-A round and participated in its Series A

Company Profile: Founded in 2018, Machenike is dedicated to deeply integrating AI and automotive engineering to liberate human drivers and transform the future of transportation. As a full-stack autonomous driving solution provider with fully self-developed automotive-grade autonomous driving computing platforms, complete software algorithms, and full system integration capabilities, the company delivers customized high-performance intelligent driving solutions for diverse customer needs, empowering L1-L4 intelligent driving across the full cycle.

Data+AI Data Intelligence Infrastructure Software Company

Boray Data Completes Over 100 Million RMB Strategic Financing

BlueRun Ventures invested in its Pre-A and Series A rounds

Company Profile: Boray Data is a database-centric "Data+AI" data intelligence infrastructure software company and one of the first batch of specialized and innovative "Little Giant" enterprises recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Boray Data's product line features a complete big data real-time analytics toolchain, covering the full core product system from data integration, storage, processing, and analytics mining to visualization. It provides complete platform products on demand or core database products within the platform, enabling real-time analytics processing of massive, high-throughput, high-concurrency, multi-source heterogeneous big data. This achieves ad-hoc querying, real-time analytics, deep mining, and intuitive visualization of large-scale data, reducing query and analysis latency to millisecond levels — providing comprehensive support for digital transformation in government, industry, and enterprises.

Power Battery Recycling Solution Provider

Borui Cycle Completes Tens of Millions RMB Series A

BlueRun Ventures was the exclusive investor in its Pre-A round

Company Profile: Borui Cycle is a power battery recycling solution provider, with core technologies in rare and precious metal extraction, high-end metal material recycling, and battery bank management. It enables effective and clean utilization of key metal resources in power batteries, reducing consumption of primary mineral resources and enhancing secondary use value of materials.

▶ More Exciting Content ◀

BlueRun Ventures was founded in 1998 in Silicon Valley. BlueRun Ventures China was established in 2005 and is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

Currently, BlueRun Ventures China manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds with over 15 billion RMB in assets under management, making it one of the largest early-stage funds in China. It invests primarily at Pre-A and Series A stages, covering hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumption, and healthcare. It has cumulatively invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi Used Cars, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, YunSheng Intelligence, Anxin Wangdun, BioMap, and others.

BlueRun Ventures has been ranked #1 in Zero2IPO's "China Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions," #1 in ChinaVenture's "China Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions TOP30," and named among Preqin's Top 10 Global VC Fund Managers for Sustained High Returns.

Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has repeatedly received honors from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations as "China Early-Stage Firm of the Year," "China Top Venture Capital Firm," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Firm," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm."