BlueRun Ventures Quarterly Investment & Financing Overview | 2023 Q4

Every quarter, we round up the latest funding news from BlueRun Ventures' portfolio companies.

In Q4 2023, the BlueRun family logged eight publicly disclosed financing events, spanning AI, enterprise services, hard tech, and biotech. Two were new investments and six were follow-on rounds.

Interested in these projects or looking to join their teams? Reach us at china@lanchiventures.com

New Investments

Construction Robotics Firm Zhuling Technology Closes Eight-Figure Seed Round, Exclusively Backed by BlueRun Ventures

Company Overview: Founded in September 2022 by leading Chinese robotics experts, AI scientists, and construction industry veterans, Zhuling Technology is building a high-tech company focused on construction robotics R&D and application. The company concentrates on two business lines — complete construction robot systems and core components — and holds multiple industry-first invention patents. Its product maturity, value, and research innovation have already gained traction and validation from top-tier industry players.

BlueRun's Take: Construction is a pillar industry in China, employing over ten million workers. Aging demographics and harsh working conditions are seriously undermining productivity and labor stability. The Zhuling team brings a rare hybrid of deep robotics engineering expertise and real construction domain knowledge. They've assembled top talent across innovative AI algorithms, sensor development, system design, and construction processes — and have defined a new product architecture and matrix for next-generation construction robots. We're very bullish on the broad deployment of robotics across construction.

Legal AI Specialist PowerLaw AI Closes Nearly RMB 80 Million Pre-B Round, Led by BlueRun Ventures

Company Overview: PowerLaw AI has released MeCheck, an intelligent contract review product, and MeFlow, an intelligent contract management platform, helping enterprises upgrade to integrated contract management that connects business and finance — improving cost efficiency, compliance and risk control, and precision decision-making in complex markets. This year, the company also partnered with leading general-purpose LLM provider Zhipu AI to launch PowerLawGLM, a 100-billion-parameter legal vertical model, and has deeply integrated legal LLM capabilities into its smart contract business. Building on its differentiated competitive edge in intelligent contracts and its leading position in legal LLMs, the company has achieved over 200% year-over-year revenue growth.

BlueRun's Take: Generative AI has rapidly entered the mainstream over the past year, driving not just consumer-facing innovation but also a significant wave of B2B intelligent transformation. PowerLaw AI applies NLP, data mining, and related technologies to deliver full-lifecycle intelligent contract management for enterprises. With the boost from generative AI and large models, the company developed China's first legal LLM. As the lead investor in this round, BlueRun Ventures expects PowerLaw AI to continue deepening its legal LLM capabilities, iterating and optimizing its smart contract management products, enabling enterprises to access legal services more intelligently and efficiently, and continuously pushing industry innovation forward.

Follow-On Rounds

North American Last-Mile Delivery Platform UniUni Closes $20 Million B2 Round, with Continued Support from BlueRun Ventures

Company Overview: UniUni uses a batch-dispatch crowdsourcing model with high technology, light assets, and lean staffing to dramatically reduce delivery costs while improving service quality, offering competitive income opportunities for ordinary car owners, and achieving lower emissions for environmental benefit. UniUni's North American footprint is taking shape, with 50+ tier-1, -2, and -3 sorting centers and pickup station networks across the continent, processing nearly 300,000 parcels daily with rapidly scalable replication capabilities. Same-day delivery is now available in all major Canadian cities.

BlueRun's Take: In the e-commerce era, UniUni's distinctive internet crowdsourcing model delivers clear advantages across logistics' most critical dimensions — speed, delivery success rate, and cost — giving it a shot at building a new $10 billion-plus global logistics giant. As UniUni's Series A lead investor, BlueRun has now participated in three consecutive follow-on rounds, committed to supporting UniUni's growth into one of the great global companies of this new era.

Metabolic Disease-Focused Recombinant Protein Drug Innovation Platform Zhitai Bio Closes Nearly RMB 200 Million B+ Round, with Continued Support from BlueRun Ventures

Company Overview: Founded in September 2018, Zhitai Bio's core team comes from Novo Nordisk and other leading domestic and international companies, with deep experience in recombinant protein drug development. The company focuses on producing recombinant protein drugs via E. coli, developing innovative biologics for chronic metabolic diseases including diabetes, obesity, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to improve public health management and quality of life.

BlueRun's Take: Zhitai Bio has consistently pursued differentiated innovation. Its ultra-long-acting GLP-1 product features a uniquely extended dosing interval, offering the potential for significantly improved patient compliance. We continue to believe Zhitai can become a major player in weight management, both in China and globally.

Chain Retail Digital Construction Full-Stack Collaboration Platform Don Quijote Closes RMB 100 Million+ Series B, with Continued Support from BlueRun Ventures

Company Overview: Founded in 2016 and incubated by construction tech giant Glodon, Don Quijote is a full-stack digital construction collaboration platform for chain retail. It applies BIM, cloud computing, big data, IoT, mobile internet, and AI to deliver end-to-end digital turnkey services covering design, construction, and operations for commercial spaces. The company has created a digital turnkey ecosystem involving owners, designers, contractors, and suppliers — shared, co-created, and mutually beneficial. Over seven years, Don Quijote has continuously expanded its boundaries: from developing core digital turnkey engines and iterating intelligent BIM products, to entering chain retail and establishing digital construction industry standards, to reconstructing industrial chain collaboration through "AI engine + industry SaaS + supply chain + turnkey."

BlueRun's Take: Don Quijote has pioneered a distinctly Chinese model of enterprise service by combining technology, data, and AI. As an early investor, BlueRun has witnessed the company's evolution in enterprise service models. Over the past two years, Don Quijote has not only continued building industry competitiveness but also entered a track of rapid, high-quality growth in business and revenue. For China to become a digital powerhouse, Chinese-model enterprise services have tremendous potential. Don Quijote is already the leader in China's chain store digitalization赛道, and we're optimistic about its future — which is why we're increasing our investment.

Distributed AI Development and Deployment Platform Luchen Tech Closes Nearly RMB 100 Million A+ Round; BlueRun Ventures Was Its Angel Investor

Company Overview: Founded in 2021, Luchen Tech's core business is building a distributed AI development and deployment platform that helps enterprises reduce the cost of deploying large models and improve training and inference efficiency. Its current products include the open-source efficient deep learning system Colossal-AI and its corresponding enterprise PaaS platform. The platform comprises a heterogeneous memory management system, efficient N-dimensional parallelism system, and low-latency inference system — all designed to minimize model deployment costs and maximize compute efficiency for customers.

Leading Domestic Automotive-Grade Chip Company Yuntu Semiconductor Closes Hundreds-of-Millions RMB B1 Round; BlueRun Ventures Invested in Its Pre-A and Series A Rounds

Company Overview: To date, Yuntu Semiconductor has established deep partnerships with dozens of OEMs and well-known domestic auto parts manufacturers, securing 300+ design wins and shipping millions of units. In August this year, Yuntu launched the YTM32BIHA series high-performance multi-core processor. Within just three months of release, it has already secured design win commitments from multiple customers and entered the application development and design phase. The YTM32BIHA is a high-performance automotive-grade MCU with multiple Cortex-M7 cores, supporting high-bandwidth, high-reliability on-chip embedded flash memory. It meets ASIL-D functional safety certification and AEC-Q100 Auto-Grade 1 standards, with applications in automotive powertrain, chassis, functional safety controllers, and domain controllers.

Global Leader in Exoskeleton Technology ChengTian Technology Brings in International Investor Pappas Capital; BlueRun Ventures Was the Sole Investor in Its Series A and Participated in Its A+ Round

Company Overview: As a national high-tech enterprise, ChengTian Technology is dedicated to R&D and application of core exoskeleton robot technologies including core algorithms and components. To date, the company has independently filed for 500+ intellectual property rights with 300+ granted, and in 2023 received the China Patent Silver Award. Its self-developed rehabilitation exoskeleton device, certified as an "innovative Class II medical device," was the first in China to obtain NMPA registration for neurological rehabilitation — filling a domestic gap. Authoritative academic societies and associations have assessed its overall technical capability as reaching internationally leading levels in the same field.

▶ More to Explore ◀

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2005, BlueRun Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups. The firm currently manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds domestically. BlueRun invests primarily at Pre-A and Series A stages across technology, consumer, and healthcare, with nearly 200 portfolio companies including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Gaussian Robotics, Songguo Mobility, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, CloudSaints Intelligence, Anxin Network Shield, 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 Global Top 10 VC Fund Managers for Sustained High Returns.

The firm has also received consecutive annual recognitions from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media as "China's Best Early-Stage Firm," "China Top Venture Capital Firm," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Firm," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm."