Facing Towering Waves and Endless Voyages, We Climb Without Cease | 2023 Annual Fund Partners Meeting

Today (May 10), BlueRun Ventures held its 2023 Annual Fund Partners Meeting in Beijing. The event brought together over 200 LPs, BlueRun portfolio company founders, and partners to explore frontier topics in AI, globalization, intelligent manufacturing, and biotech — mapping out the future of technology and daily life.

In his opening remarks, Managing Partner Jui Chan noted that this year marks BlueRun Ventures' fifteenth year in China, and fifteen years of deep local roots and unwavering commitment to tech investing. The meeting's theme, "Riding the Swell, Climbing Without End," captures both what has changed and what has stayed constant at BlueRun over this decade and a half. Adapting to change is the perpetual theme of innovation investing. We cannot predict risk, but we can prepare for it. Those who stay ready are the ones who never waste a crisis — and who land the biggest catches in the swell.

Chan believes that forward-looking vision is always the first line of defense against seismic shifts. As one of China's largest early-stage funds, BlueRun began focusing on tech investing long before hard tech became consensus, making early bets across hard tech, digital tech, consumer tech, and biotech. Through continuous evolution, the firm has developed the right organizational mechanisms, industrial ecosystems, and talent structures to operate as an institutionalized team — making it more adaptable to current conditions, more resilient against volatility, and better positioned to build lasting advantages.

Next, Managing Partner Terry Zhu laid out BlueRun's investment strategy and priority areas. BlueRun's conviction in China remains unchanged, he said. As one of the world's top two economies and a global engine of innovation-driven growth, China holds distinctive comparative advantages: an engineer dividend, a world-class innovation ecosystem, "world's factory" supply chain strengths, and "world-class" industries in robotics, new energy, and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the world is undergoing a simultaneous transformation — upgrading its energy structure, grappling with accelerating aging, and facing a productivity revolution led by AI. When China's comparative advantages meet global demand, it will ignite a new global cycle.

He added that BlueRun will continue to focus on: intelligent computing and indigenous innovation, cross-disciplinary opportunities at the intersection of software and hardware, and the technological revolution driven by energy transition and its vast industrial chain — seeking out entrepreneurs with global vision, long-term perspective, and exceptional innovation capabilities.

Building on both managing partners' themes, BlueRun Partners Cao Wei and Shi Jianping, and Director Rong Jing shared the firm's investment strategies and results across three critical sectors: robotics & human-machine interaction, digital tech, and biotech.

BlueRun believes China has the complete industrial ecosystem to incubate and propel globally leading robotics companies. The emergence of multimodal large models will enhance robotic capabilities across multiple dimensions, unlocking new application scenarios. At the same time, as total data volume and compute power grow exponentially and data modalities become richer, human-machine interaction — a critical component of every generational ecosystem — is entering a new phase. Human-machine interaction directly impacts user experience, efficiency, and cost, and will intersect with every industry to drive innovative applications.

In digital tech, BlueRun argues that intelligent computing and indigenous innovation will become the new drivers of China's innovation-powered digital economy. As generative pretrained language models usher in the era of intelligent computing, virtual knowledge workers created by intelligent computing will accelerate industrial digitalization, while compute power and green energy will be the most fundamental production inputs.

In biotech, BlueRun sees biotech indices in secondary markets gradually stabilizing. Going forward, capital markets will focus more on commercialization prospects, favoring products that combine large addressable markets with low-cost manufacturability. Outstanding biotech enterprises need a relentless pursuit of product innovation and differentiation, and the ability to navigate steadily through the industry transformation created by the intersection of disciplines, technologies, and policy.

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The event also served as a brainstorming session between BlueRun and its portfolio founders. Over ten portfolio company leaders were invited to speak and join discussions on finding pathways and opportunities amid violent waves. BlueRun portfolio companies CloudMinds Auto, Yiauto, and Gaussian Robotics shared their growth and reflections from the past year.

On the AI 2.0 era, Terry Zhu joined BioMap, DeepMaterial, Jishi Design, and Yiliang Technology to imagine the myriad possibilities of AI empowering vertical industries. The portfolio companies shared their current efforts to embrace large models and their outlooks on where large models are headed. On the dawn of a new era of global expansion, Cao Wei joined Oladance, Bricycle, Viture, and Keyi Technology to discuss the internationalization paths for Chinese tech companies, and how to build flexibility, innovativeness, and risk resilience amid volatility.

In today's world, macro uncertainty continues to amplify, and the bipolar order is being reconstructed. Against a backdrop of intensifying global volatility and rising anti-globalization sentiment, the investment industry is experiencing its own downturn. Yet in the face of these waves, we can do more than wait passively — because along with seismic change comes new technology, new breakthroughs, and new momentum for growth. Over the past fifteen years, BlueRun Ventures has stayed ready to cross cycles and embrace change. We hope to join more entrepreneurs in throwing ourselves into the historic wave of technological innovation.

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Founded in Silicon Valley, BlueRun Ventures was established in 2005 as a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

BlueRun Ventures currently manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the country's largest early-stage funds. The firm invests primarily at Pre-A and Series A stages, with coverage spanning hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumer, and healthcare. It has backed more than 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Songguo Chuxing, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, CloudMinds Auto, Anxin Wangdun, and BioMap.

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

The firm has also received consecutive recognition from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations as "China Early-Stage Firm of the Year," "China Top-Tier VC," "Most Founder-Friendly Early-Stage Firm," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm."