BlueRun Ventures Quarterly Investment Roundup | 2023 Q2

Each quarter, we compile updates on funding rounds for BlueRun Ventures portfolio companies.

In Q2 2023, the BlueRun Ventures family recorded 10 publicly disclosed funding events, spanning artificial intelligence, enterprise services, hard tech, and consumer technology. Four were new investments, while six received follow-on funding.

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

New Investments

Consumer XR Glasses Brand

VITURE Closes Nearly $10 Million Series A+ Round

Sole investment by BlueRun Ventures

** **

Company Profile: Founded in September 2021, VITURE positions its products as premium consumer-grade XR glasses, with content focused on AAA console gaming and immersive video viewing. In May 2022, VITURE's first-generation product, VITURE One, attracted over 5,000 backers and exceeded $3 million in oversubscriptions on the overseas crowdfunding platform Kickstarter — breaking Oculus's previous record of $2.4 million. This April, VITURE completed delivery of all crowdfunded and pre-ordered units, and received three awards: the CES Innovation Award, iF Design Award, and Red Dot Award.

BlueRun's Take: VITURE has an exceptionally strong core team with solid foundational XR technology expertise and continuous innovation capabilities. Its debut product, VITURE One, was the first in the industry to leverage a cloud computing framework, achieving a perfect blend of mobile portability and high-performance rendering on AR glasses — allowing users to play AAA titles anywhere, anytime. VITURE's first product received widespread acclaim from users in North America, Europe, Japan, and other overseas markets upon launch. We are very optimistic about the vast market space and prospects for XR products abroad, and look forward to the team continuously building products beloved by global users.

Gallium Oxide Semiconductor Company

Jaren Semiconductor Completes Tens of Millions of RMB Angel Round

Led by BlueRun Ventures

Company Profile: Hangzhou Jaren Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was founded in September 2022. It is a technology enterprise focused on the R&D, production, and sales of ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor single-crystal substrates and epitaxial materials, including gallium oxide. The company pioneered a novel non-conductive mold method for gallium oxide single-crystal growth, breaking the international market monopoly on gallium oxide materials and offering single-crystal substrate materials with fully independent intellectual property rights. The founding team hails from Zhejiang University's State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials and the Zhejiang University Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center.

BlueRun's Take: The rapid development of new energy vehicles and new-type power systems in China has placed increasingly demanding requirements on power semiconductor materials and devices. Gallium oxide, as an ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor material, demonstrates strong performance and commercialization potential for devices in high-voltage, high-power applications. Moreover, gallium oxide's theoretical cost is relatively low, making it a promising candidate for future cost-effective power semiconductor materials. The Jaren Semiconductor team possesses years of experience in semiconductor material growth and has become one of the important players in China's gallium oxide sector. BlueRun Ventures believes that under the leadership of Academician Yang Deren and Professor Zhang Hui, Jaren Technology has the potential to become a leading enterprise in China's gallium oxide field, further strengthening its competitive advantage in wide bandgap semiconductor materials and devices.

Graph Intelligence Company

Fabarta Raises Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Pre-A Round

Follow-on investment by BlueRun Ventures

Company Profile: Founded in 2021, Fabarta focuses on using graph intelligence technology to unlock complex business value in heterogeneous data environments, building AI-oriented infrastructure. The founding team has a distinguished track record of combining cutting-edge technology with commercial success. Core members bring years of experience in graph and AI engineering R&D and commercialization, having worked at Alibaba, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, and SAP. They possess extensive productization capabilities in the B2B space, as well as deep expertise in cloud-native and distributed database technologies.

BlueRun's Take: Graph intelligence is a critical infrastructure for current graph analytics and future cognitive intelligent computing. Fabarta has unique insights and years of technical and industry accumulation in graph intelligence technology innovation, high-performance scalable algorithms, and industry scenarios — enabling it to better meet enterprise demand for high-quality graph intelligence computing. Its team combines technical, product, and successful commercial experience, and its products have already begun commercialization with strong customer recognition. As Fabarta's first-round investor, BlueRun Ventures looks forward to the company continuously delivering cutting-edge results in the fusion of cognitive and logical computing.

AI Company

Xinchen AI Receives Strategic Investment

Follow-on investment by BlueRun Ventures

** **

Company Profile: Founded in July 2021, Xinchen AI was established by Dr. Lan Zhenzhong, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. While working at Google AI, he led multiple natural language processing and computer vision projects, successfully developing ALBERT — a lightweight version of Google's BERT large model. Xinchen AI focuses on large model research and applications, adhering to a philosophy of enhancing general large model capabilities and advancing the intelligence of upper-layer applications. It has built a product architecture spanning the model layer, middleware layer, and application layer.

Follow-On Funding Events

Ultra-Low Altitude · Integrated Air-Ground Operator

Yunsheng Intelligence Completes C++ Round

BlueRun Ventures was its Series A investor, and participated in Series B and B+ rounds

Company Profile: Founded in 2017, Yunsheng Intelligence is a national-level "little giant" enterprise that uses artificial intelligence as its core, with four-dimensional real-world mapping, industrial drones, fully automated airports, ground robots, and IoT cloud platforms as its carriers. It integrates multiple sensors to provide industry users with "aircraft, network, and cloud integrated" system solutions, offering air-ground联动 four-dimensional holographic management and control platforms for power, oil and gas, emergency rescue, smart cities, and other sectors.

Distributed HTAP Database

Zetuo Technology Completes New Funding Round

BlueRun Ventures led its angel round

Company Profile: Founded in 2020, Zetuo Technology positions its products as next-generation distributed databases, aiming to become an expert in massive data storage management, high-concurrency OLTP transaction processing, and OLAP real-time data analytics.

Domestic Precision Signal Chain IC Manufacturer

Shanhai Semiconductor Completes 120 Million RMB Series A Round

BlueRun Ventures led its angel round

Company Profile: Shanhai Semiconductor is a pioneer in China's precision signal chain chip sector, focusing on Industry 4.0 and new energy markets. In April 2022, Shanhai mass-produced the 32-bit ultra-high-resolution geophysical exploration AFE chip SHC6686, developed with 100% independent intellectual property rights, breaking the exclusive monopoly held by certain international companies over core chips in global energy exploration, and quickly securing large-scale market orders and completing delivery.

BlueRun's Take: Chips play an extremely important role in industrial and new energy sectors, with very high barriers to entry. As pioneers in China's precision signal chain chip sector focused on Industry 4.0 and new energy markets, the Shanhai Semiconductor team — composed of core members from top domestic and international semiconductor companies — has a deep and precise grasp of industry applications and demands. Shanhai Semiconductor has successfully mass-produced its first chip and won recognition from customers. BlueRun Ventures is bullish on such a pragmatic team that emphasizes both market and technology, and believes they can achieve long-term success in the industry.

Building a Distributed AI Development and Deployment Platform

Luchen Tech Completes Hundreds of Millions of RMB Series A Round

BlueRun Ventures led its angel round

Company Profile: Founded in 2021, Luchen Tech's main business is building a distributed AI development and deployment platform to help enterprises reduce the cost of large model implementation and improve training and inference efficiency. Luchen Tech's current products include the open-source efficient deep learning system Colossal-AI and its corresponding enterprise PaaS platform. The platform consists of a heterogeneous memory management system, an efficient N-dimensional parallel system, and a low-latency inference system — all designed to help customers minimize model deployment costs and maximize computing efficiency.

Fusion Energy Commercial Company

Energy Singularity Completes Nearly 400 Million RMB Pre-A Round

BlueRun Ventures was its first-round investor

Company Profile: Since completing its first funding round in early 2022, Energy Singularity has focused on the high-temperature superconducting tokamak technology route, rapidly building its R&D and engineering teams and steadily advancing its R&D plans. Currently, Energy Singularity's independently developed Honghuang-70 high-temperature superconducting tokamak device is being processed and constructed according to schedule, with assembly expected to begin in Q3 this year and operation by year-end. Qimen is an independently developed AI-based plasma operation control system that will first be applied to Honghuang-70's operation control, with continuous iterative upgrades. Meanwhile, Energy Singularity has begun R&D on Jingtian magnets — core components for next-generation high-field tokamak devices.

eVTOL Aircraft Innovation Enterprise

ZeroG Aircraft Industry Completes Nearly 100 Million RMB Angel Round

BlueRun Ventures was the sole investor in its seed round

Company Profile: ZeroG Aircraft Industry is an innovative manned electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft enterprise led by an academician and distinguished by its technological leadership. Founded in March 2021 and headquartered in Hefei High-Tech Zone, the company has established R&D, operations, production, and flight test branches in Nanjing, Shenzhen, Wuhu, and other locations. As China's first eVTOL enterprise with three generations of aircraft under parallel development, the company consistently adheres to "future, green, innovation" as its overall development philosophy, with a vision of "building the third transportation ecosystem on Earth." Using eVTOL aircraft as its vehicle, the company continues to deepen its efforts in driving the "green revolution" in aviation and advancing advanced air mobility, contributing to China's early establishment of a comprehensive three-dimensional transportation system.

BlueRun's Take: Aviation electrification is an important investment theme for BlueRun. Electric aircraft offer numerous advantages, including lower costs, higher safety, and greater intelligence. These advantages make clear that the curtain has risen on aviation's electrification. The ZeroG team has deep technical accumulation in the aviation aircraft field, having successfully designed multiple configurations of vertical take-off and landing aircraft, with profound understanding of the technical characteristics of various configurations. They possess the ability to actively select target markets based on aircraft configuration technical capabilities — a technology commercialization strength. The team has also completed airworthiness certification for aircraft from scratch multiple times, with extensive airworthiness certification experience. We look forward to the ZeroG team leading the development of aviation electrification.

▶ More Exciting Content ◀

BlueRun Ventures was established in Silicon Valley in 1998. BlueRun Ventures China was founded 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 assets under management exceeding 15 billion RMB, making it one of the largest early-stage funds in China. It invests primarily at the 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.com, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, Yunsheng Intelligence, Anxin Wangdun, and BioMap.

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

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