BlueRun Ventures Continues to Back Ascend Energy in Tens-of-Millions RMB Series A Round | BlueRun Ventures
A New Paradigm for Battery Intelligence, Powered by "Sensors + Data + AI"
Beijing Shengke Energy Technology Co., Ltd. announced the completion of a Series A financing round worth tens of millions of RMB. The round was co-led by the YaRui-Zhiyou Scientists Fund, Linge Ventures, and CSC Capital, with Jingke Xincai Zhi participating as a follow-on investor. Existing shareholder BlueRun Ventures continued to increase its stake. The funds will be primarily used for product iteration, market expansion, and technical team expansion.
Jui Chan, Managing Partner of BlueRun Ventures, stated: As China's electric vehicle and power battery industries enter a fast track of development, value extraction across the full lifecycle of batteries — from manufacturing to recycling — has become increasingly important, with substantial room for improvement. Drawing on years of deep accumulation of high-quality data and mechanistic models for power batteries, the Shengke team has pioneered a new paradigm of battery intelligence driven by "sensors + data + AI." As an early investor in Shengke, BlueRun continues to be optimistic about and support the Shengke team, helping users continuously discover and enhance battery lifecycle value while leading industry transformation in battery intelligence through technology.
Shengke Energy is dedicated to building a battery intelligence infrastructure platform, with a battery intelligence digital network at its core, focusing on two major application scenarios: smart energy new infrastructure and intelligent battery inspection and recycling. In new infrastructure scenarios such as charging and energy storage, it provides intelligent safety operations services and comprehensive solutions; in battery cascade utilization and recycling, it provides intelligent battery inspection, valuation, and trading service solutions.
Shengke Energy adheres to a technology-driven approach and has established PERB1.0, the first large-scale pre-trained model for battery time-series data. The model was trained on over 50 GWh of battery data, covers nearly all battery types, and can complete the vast majority of battery time-series tasks, effectively solving the long-term accurate prediction problem for arbitrary battery types that traditional BMS cannot address. It is the core technology of the battery intelligence infrastructure.
PERB1.0 has three major advantages: First, greater accuracy — it can leverage unlabeled data, increasing trainable data scale by 10,000x with higher precision; second, faster speed — the model is highly transferable, reducing new battery cold start from three months to within one week; third, lower cost — it enables adaptive iteration without manual parameter tuning.
At the current stage, both China's new energy vehicles and power batteries have entered a fast track of development. As battery installation heads toward the "TWh" era, two major pain points will become increasingly prominent: First, battery safety issues — including rapidly escalating risks in electric vehicle charging safety, energy storage station safety, and more. Beyond improving battery material system safety (intrinsic safety) and strengthening thermal runaway propagation suppression (passive safety), enhancing early warning and prevention capabilities to address risks before they emerge (active safety) is urgently needed. Second, efficient battery recycling and utilization — constrained by the difficulty of high-precision, low-cost battery inspection technology, the retired battery market remains in an early stage of "blind box opening" and "selling by the ton," resulting in massive waste of retired battery value. There is an urgent need to build an efficient retired battery recycling and utilization chain and ecosystem centered on intelligent inspection.
Dr. Chu Zhengyu, founder and CEO of Shengke Energy, explained that Shengke effectively enhances battery safety by applying AI capabilities to practical scenarios such as charging, energy storage, and recycling, and is gradually forming an intelligent battery inspection and value assessment system. Shengke firmly believes that digitalization and intelligence will play an increasingly important role in the full lifecycle management and control of power batteries.
In its early days, Shengke Energy established a high-quality real-world vehicle battery dataset through deep cooperation with numerous leading OEMs and battery manufacturers, accumulating massive amounts of multi-type, multi-stage battery data that supports the full-process development and validation of algorithms. Through deep learning, it formed a technical route of "unified large-scale pre-trained model + multi-task framework," building an anomaly detection framework that integrates various electrochemical mechanism parameters with high detection rates and low false alarm rates, as well as a high-precision lifespan estimation framework.
In business scenario selection, Shengke Energy is highly focused, rooted in high-growth, high-value energy new infrastructure and battery recycling scenarios. Energy new infrastructure scenarios refer to charging pile and energy storage installation and operations. By 2025, China's public charging pile market is expected to reach 204.5 billion RMB, with a compound annual growth rate of 44% from 2021 to 2025; energy storage new installations in 2025 are expected to reach 45 GWh, with a market size approaching 60 billion RMB and a compound annual growth rate of 70% during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. Battery recycling scenarios refer to cascade utilization and regeneration of retired batteries. By 2030, China's retired power battery volume is expected to exceed 2.37 million tons, with total recycling market size surpassing 100 billion RMB.
Currently, Shengke Energy has established comprehensive deep cooperation with over 100 partners including international energy giants, new energy OEMs, battery manufacturers, charging operators, and industry associations such as Shell, Total, BAIC Group, Farasis, Putian New Energy, and the China Automobile Dealers Association. The company's business is growing rapidly, with orders in the first half of 2022 increasing by over 100% year-on-year. Shengke Energy has established a clear commercialization path, completed commercial closed-loop validation in core segments, and is at an important stage of scaled replication.
Shengke Energy has also made important progress in battery internal sensor technology. Advanced battery sensing technology will fundamentally change the traditional "try-test" battery R&D approach, forming a new battery R&D paradigm driven by "sensors + data + AI" that substantially accelerates R&D speed. In the future, intelligent sensors integrating multi-dimensional signals will lead batteries into the smart battery era. Smart batteries with pre-installed battery sensors can real-time perceive internal potential, temperature, pressure, and other signals, which will further accelerate Shengke Energy's pace of building and improving its battery intelligence infrastructure platform.
Founded in 2019, Shengke Energy is an incubated enterprise of Tsinghua University's School of Vehicle and Mobility Battery Safety Laboratory, specializing in battery intelligence technology. It has accumulated over 40 patents. Core team members are PhDs or master's graduates from renowned research institutions including Tsinghua University, MIT, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, alongside senior engineers with over 10 years of experience from well-known new energy industry enterprises. It is a benchmark for Tsinghua University's scientific and technological achievement transformation, and has received recognition as a national high-tech enterprise and a CB Insights China New Energy Vehicle Innovative Enterprise.
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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 manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding 15 billion RMB, making it one of the largest early-stage funds domestically. Its investment stage focuses on Pre-A and Series A rounds, covering hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumption, and healthcare. It has invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi Used Cars, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Monster Charging, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, Yunsheng Intelligence, Anxin Wangdun, and BioMap.
BlueRun Ventures has been ranked first by Zero2IPO in the "China Early-Stage Investment Institutions Top 30" and by ChinaVenture in the "China Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions TOP 30," and has been named by Preqin among the Top 10 venture capital fund managers globally for sustained high-return performance.
Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has for multiple consecutive years received recognition from media organizations including Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, and Jiemian as "China's Best Early-Stage Institution of the Year," "China's Top Venture Capital Institution," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Institution of the Year," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Institution of the Year."