Beyond the Quadrant: Forging an Undefined Path | BlueRun Ventures 2024 Annual Fund Partners Meeting
Breaking Through a Mental Block
Today (November 15), BlueRun Ventures' 2024 Annual Fund LP Meeting took place in Shanghai. With the theme "Beyond the Quadrant," the event brought together over 100 LPs, BlueRun Ventures portfolio company founders, and partners for in-depth discussions on frontier technologies including AI, embodied intelligence, advanced computing, and biomedicine — collectively seeking to break free from mental blocks and explore uncharted territory.
At a time when global growth is broadly slowing, how can growth get back on track? In his opening remarks, Jui Chan, Managing Partner at BlueRun Ventures, argued that we must confront and accept that the first principles of industry growth have fundamentally shifted. While past growth was driven by free flow and optimal allocation across borders, that momentum has increasingly given way to great-power competition, which is now propelling above-expectation growth in a handful of strategic sectors. Chan emphasized that navigating this transformation requires leveraging China's emerging comparative advantages and seizing opportunities from the new wave of technological change. Encouragingly, he noted, China's traditional strengths are being upgraded: supply chains are becoming knowledge-intensive, the engineer dividend is yielding abundant high-caliber AI talent, and the dual trends of global localization and trade partner diversification are driving overseas demand. He expressed BlueRun Ventures' conviction that Chinese talent is capable of building world-class technology products and services that satisfy both domestic and global demand, thereby stimulating internal and external demand.
How, then, to capture growth in this new environment? Terry Zhu, Managing Partner at BlueRun Ventures, observed that every era has its core technological transformation, and today's is AI. The "triple wave" of artificial general intelligence, 3D interactive interfaces, and robotics will give rise to the Big Thing of the next 30-year mega-cycle. Along this investment thesis, BlueRun Ventures has backed quality companies across the value chain, including Moonshot AI, AgiBot, Galaxy Universal, Muyan Zhiyu, Luchen Tech, PPIO, and Fabarta.
BlueRun Ventures has also been continuously iterating, building more competitive internal teams and external ecosystems. On the founder ecosystem front, the firm has deepened its focus on the soil of early-stage innovation, developed differentiated deal sourcing, and forged deep connections with entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners — gradually forming an ecosystem spanning industry benchmarks, research institutes, top universities, and strategic partners. Meanwhile, through rigorous tracking of portfolio progress and clear, well-defined exit targets, BlueRun Ventures has achieved meaningful interim exits.
At the event, Tiejun Huang, Chairman of BAAI and Professor at Peking University's School of Computer Science, delivered a speech titled Recent Advances and Future Outlook for Artificial Intelligence. Huang noted that AI is a technology, and the defining feature of technological science is that it must continuously expand alongside technological development — hence the need for ongoing practice and exploration. In the next three years, large models will extend to visual, auditory, embodied, and action-oriented general intelligence, growing in scale while shrinking in size to become the "brain" of embodied intelligence; ordinary language will evolve into scientific language, and AI will be deployed to tackle major scientific problems.
Additionally, BlueRun Ventures Partner Cao Wei, Venture Partner Shi Jianping, Managing Director Rong Jing, and Investment Director Tao Yeliao shared the firm's investment strategies and results across four key sectors: robotics & intelligent hardware, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and deep tech.
Embodied intelligence and human-computer interaction remain hot — why do these two sectors deserve heightened attention now? BlueRun Ventures believes the global robotics market is massive and growing rapidly, and China possesses ample comparative advantages. Over the past year, embodied intelligence and humanoid robots have advanced quickly, gradually transitioning from scenario exploration to small-batch deployment; multimodal large models and embodied intelligence algorithms will further empower various robot types to unlock more application scenarios. Moreover, human-computer interaction, as a critical component of future interaction platforms, is opening up greater imaginative possibilities. With the development of multimodal foundation models, early forms of next-generation human-computer interaction devices are emerging, creating substantial opportunities for startups.
In AI, a sector drawing universal attention, where do China's advantages and opportunities lie in large models and AI applications? The past year has brought more positive signals from China's AI industry: as AI evolves from generative to agentic, Chinese large models rank second globally, and the country has the complete scenarios needed for agentic AI to achieve industry service deployment. AI super-applications and AI for Science are showing vigorous growth momentum, and as AI supply chains are restructured, China has enormous potential to provide more cost-effective AI infrastructure and applications globally. Based on these insights, BlueRun Ventures has increased its focus on agentic AI applications and infrastructure, approaching innovative companies through an AI-first lens and making full-stack deployments in the AI sector.
Deep tech is a sweeping theme — how does an investment firm choose where to place its bets? BlueRun Ventures maintains independent thinking and has developed a clear investment strategy: backing companies whose primary moat is innovative technology, with clear product-market fit and demonstrated or potential commercialization capabilities — including disruptive frontier technology companies, industry-oriented frontier technology companies, and domestic substitution plays. The firm's core deep tech focus areas include advanced computing, interconnect communications, and new energy within AI hardware infrastructure.
How to seize opportunities from industry transformation at the bottom of the biotech cycle? The industry is currently at its nadir, which is the best time to capture opportunities. Urbanization and aging form the demand foundation for biotech; Chinese innovative drug companies' drug-making capabilities are being continuously validated; MNCs facing patent cliffs will continue purchasing Chinese innovative drug assets; and new-generation AI technologies are opening up new biological possibilities. In biotech, BlueRun Ventures focuses on startups with differentiation, internationalization, commercialization, and AI+ cross-disciplinary characteristics, having invested in quality companies including Zhitai Bio, Nankai Hecheng, AllinkBio, Weiling Medical, and BioMap.
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During the panel discussions, BlueRun Ventures and portfolio company founders explored hot topics and the evolution of technology and industry across key sectors. Following two years of rapid AI development, Terry Zhu joined Moonshot AI and Muyan Zhiyu to discuss possible forms of AI-native species and how to create value within the constraints of foundation model capabilities. Synthesizing technological evolution, industrial deployment, and global competition, BlueRun Ventures Partner Cao Wei joined Galaxy Universal, AgiBot, and Lingchu Intelligence in an embodied intelligence panel to collectively examine how this field — currently straddling science and application — can accelerate toward widespread deployment. Facing compute scarcity amid the AI explosion, BlueRun Ventures Investment Director Tao Yeliao joined Jike Guanghe, Yixin Intelligence, Xinlai Technology, and Energy Singularity to assess global compute demand trends and technological evolution, jointly envisioning how China can forge a distinctive compute framework path. As biotech plays a movement from serious medicine to mass consumer health, BlueRun Ventures Managing Director Rong Jing joined Zhitai Bio, Weiling Medical, Yangshan Medical, and Kerui Medical to analyze optimal paths for consumer health products and approaches to product design, market promotion, and company development.
In the exhibition area, BlueRun Ventures portfolio companies showcased their innovations, presenting humanoid robots, XR glasses, medical devices, e-VTOL aircraft, drones, lawn-mowing robots, optical modules, and more — offering attendees a vivid technology exhibition.
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This is an era of challenges and opportunities. Facing slowing global economic growth and rising uncertainty, BlueRun Ventures firmly believes that embracing change and leaping beyond traditional quadrants will reveal magnificent scenery on the undefined road ahead.