Five AI IPOs in Seven Months, Qiming Venture Partners: Investing in AI Is the Biggest Certainty for China Over the Next Two Decades
Thirteen years, over 100 portfolio companies, covering the full AI industry chain.
The wave of artificial intelligence is sweeping the globe, and when cutting-edge technology makes its way from the lab to the depths of industry, it often relies on the fuel of venture capital. In China, a cohort of sharp-eyed early-stage investors, through more than a decade of steadfast commitment, have finally reaped certain rewards on this track full of uncertainty.
In just ten days between late 2025 and early 2026, Qiming Venture Partners celebrated three consecutive IPOs in the AI sector. Extend the timeline to the past seven months, and the firm has accumulated five AI IPOs including Unisound, Yunji Technology, Insilico Medicine, Biren Technology, and Zhipu AI.
This string of milestones signals that, following more than ten years of forward-looking, systematic deployment, Qiming has entered a solid, concentrated harvest period in AI.
As one of China's earliest institutional investors in artificial intelligence, Qiming Venture Partners has kept a sustained focus on this track since 2013, gradually building a full-chain investment map spanning infrastructure, model layer, and application layer. Grounded in deep insight into the evolutionary trajectory of China's AI industry and long-term companionship with its portfolio, Qiming has not only accurately captured multiple technological inflection points but also witnessed and catalyzed the growth and rise of a batch of benchmark companies.
"For the next 20 years, investing in AI is the greatest certainty in Chinese investing." This statement from Duane Kuang, Founding Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, stems from his firm conviction in the trend of technological transformation and rests on the robust deployment and continuously delivered results Qiming has already built in the AI domain.
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Thirteen Years, 12 Billion Yuan,
Covering the Full AI Industry Chain
According to available information, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in over 100 projects in the technology-AI sector since 2013, with cumulative investment of approximately 12 billion yuan. Meanwhile, in the intersection of healthcare innovation and AI, Qiming has also invested in nearly 30 companies. Its investment footprint clearly maps and has forward-looking guided China's AI industry through its development cycle from technological germination to commercial exploration.
Looking back, Qiming began capturing opportunities in perceptual intelligence and early autonomous driving more than a decade ago. In the interval between AlexNet's breakthrough in 2012 and AlphaGo's market ignition in 2016, it successively placed bets on companies including Unisound, Megvii, UBTECH, and WeRide.
Entering the era characterized by large models and AGI (artificial general intelligence), Qiming moved early to achieve comprehensive coverage of key segments from infrastructure layer, model layer to application layer. At the infrastructure and core model level, it invested in representative enterprises including Zhipu AI, StepFun, Shengshu Technology, Biren Technology, and Infinigence AI; at the application and frontier exploration level, it deployed projects such as Infinite Lightyear, Galaxy Universal, Tashi Zhihang, and Sharpa.
After thirteen years of deep cultivation, IPO results have begun to emerge densely, sketching a clear picture from sowing to harvest.
Specifically, at the first glimmer of dawn, Qiming had already keenly perceived that speech recognition and other discriminative technologies would become crucial breakthroughs for industrialization, and successfully identified Unisound — one of China's earliest companies applying deep learning algorithms to commercial speech recognition — decisively participating in its Series A round and continuing to support it through multiple rounds over the subsequent decade. This companionship not only helped the company traverse technological cycles but also facilitated its leap from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence — in 2023, Unisound released its 60-billion-parameter general-purpose large model "Shanhai."
In June 2025, Unisound successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with its stock price surging to as high as HK$879 per share. This journey represents not only the evolution of a technology company but also a vivid portrayal of Qiming's AI investments — beginning at germination, growing through cycles, and finally harvesting.
Similar forward-looking narratives are not isolated incidents in Qiming's investment history. On January 2, 2026, Biren Technology officially landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, creating the "first Hong Kong-listed GPU stock." And Qiming, as early as 2019 when Biren Technology was founded, served as a founding investor and led its first funding round.
Alex Zhou, Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, and Wen Zhang, founder of Biren Technology, are both alumni of Columbia University. For Zhou, this was even the first time in his career that he made an investment commitment "before the company was established" — "most investments happen at the company's 0-to-1 stage, but this was at minus-0.1."
From there, from assisting with "finding people, finding money, finding direction," to long-term service as "co-pilot," to becoming its lead cornerstone independent investor for the Hong Kong IPO, Qiming has always been Biren Technology's most steadfast partner and its largest external institutional shareholder. This companionship beginning from "minus-0.1" has become the best footnote in Qiming's AI investment map regarding vision, courage, and conviction.
Most recently, the stock price of Zhipu AI — the "first global large-model stock" — has been soaring, approaching twice its IPO day price, with market capitalization once breaking through HK$100 billion. Yet nearly a year before ChatGPT's release ignited the global large-model frenzy, when most people were still unfamiliar with the concept of "large models," Qiming had already jointly led Zhipu AI's Series B1 round.
This crucial funding directly supported Zhipu AI in completing the R&D breakthrough of its first 100-billion-parameter large model, GLM. Thereafter, Qiming continued to invest in multiple follow-on rounds and ultimately served as a cornerstone independent investor, escorting its listing under Chapter 18C of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Such harvests stem from a core philosophy that has run through Qiming's work: "Explosive growth in AI applications can be expected." It is precisely based on conviction in AI's empowerment of all industries that they have not only placed bets at the infrastructure layer but also been among the first to capture disruptive opportunities in key application domains.
Autonomous driving unicorn WeRide exemplifies this. When the company was founded in 2017, Qiming served as the sole institutional investor, co-investing with the founder. Over the subsequent nearly ten years, from two critical convertible note supports in the early days to continued加码 in Series A and B rounds, Qiming made rapid decisions multiple times when WeRide faced funding tightness, steadfastly accompanying it from technology R&D to scaled deployment, all the way from startup to Nasdaq and then to completing its dual primary listing in Hong Kong in 2025.
Qiming also harvested what was the largest Biotech IPO in the 2025 Hong Kong market — Insilico Medicine. As early as 2019 — four years before OpenAI drew widespread attention — Kan Chen, Partner at Qiming Venture Partners and Co-Head of Healthcare Innovation, and his team, based on firm conviction that "AI will profoundly restructure drug R&D efficiency," completed the investment in Insilico Medicine. After seven years of companionship and multiple rounds of additional investment, this long-term companionship born of technological faith finally reached its moment of returns.
From early investments in Unisound, UBTECH, WeRide, and others, to more recent investments in Zhipu AI and Biren Technology, the rise of these star companies fully illustrates Qiming's investment resilience of "early engagement, full escort" on key tracks, and further validates the forward-looking accuracy of its investment logic.
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Half a Step Ahead, Finding the Intersection of Technology and Market Inflection Points
Qiming's dense harvest this wave stems from a clear investment philosophy that has withstood cycle testing — "half a step ahead" is the core methodology enabling it to precisely deploy before every key inflection point in the AI industry and ultimately lead the industry in harvesting.
"As an early-stage investment institution, the most appropriate timing is to be 'half a step ahead,'" Kuang points out. "One step too early and the risk is too great; half a step too late and you can only 'add flowers to brocade.'"
This means they must have profound understanding of technology's disruptive potential while also having precise judgment of market demand and commercialization rhythm — at the moment when technological breakthrough has been validated but market consensus has not yet formed, to decisively "pull the trigger" based on independent judgment.
"Great companies in their early days are often non-consensus." Zhou believes that successful technology investment hinges on precisely identifying the subtle window between the "technology inflection point" and the "market inflection point."
He explains that a technology's path from lab to industrialization usually involves a long exploration period until some key element undergoes "tenfold-speed change," marking the arrival of the "technology breakthrough point." Then, about two to four years later, when an application allows society to perceive its enormous value, the "market inflection point" truly emerges. And the most valuable investment opportunities lie precisely between these two points.
Qiming deeply understands this and has internalized it into action. For example, based on understanding of the deep learning technology inflection point, when the market was still in its germination period, it decisively invested in Unisound, which would later use deep learning to dramatically improve speech recognition semantic understanding accuracy. Based on understanding of the technological evolution of LiDAR, artificial intelligence, and other key technologies, it invested in WeRide before any industry consensus had formed. When large-model technology had been validated but ChatGPT had not yet launched to ignite global attention to large-model companies, it completed the key investment in Zhipu AI. And based on understanding of multimodal model technology, before Sora had detonated capital's attention on multimodal models, it invested in Shengshu Technology. Such examples abound in Qiming's investment cases.
Behind the "half a step ahead" logic lies not merely a singular rational methodology but also requires strong mental fortitude. "If you truly believe in AI, you won't lie flat," Zhou says. This conviction has translated into Qiming's patient and steadfast long-term companionship with outstanding entrepreneurs.
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AI Is the Greatest Certainty of the Next Twenty Years
At this very moment, discussions surrounding an "AI bubble" are endless. After heavy deployment for more than a decade, Qiming's confidence in Chinese AI has not wavered. Kuang gave a clear and firm judgment in recent media exchanges: "I firmly believe there is no bubble in China's AI."
He analyzes: on one hand, the rise of China's AI industry happens to coincide with a period when China's equity investment market as a whole is in downturn, having not experienced irrational frenzy — the contrast formed by industry heat recovering from "extremely cold" is far from reaching bubble levels. On the other hand, and most crucially — China's AI applications "have not truly taken off yet."
Kuang further elaborates that the current massive investment in the United States stems from its having entered the "application-driven infrastructure" phase, while China remains in the "infrastructure waiting for applications" investment period. Because early large-model usage costs (per million tokens) were too high, constraining application-layer companies' market cultivation and user expansion. He predicts that by 2026, as token costs drop to a critical point, a large number of AI-native applications will emerge vigorously, thereby driving infrastructure into a virtuous cycle of "application-infrastructure" mutual acceleration.
Therefore, whether viewed from industry investment scale, industry maturity, or market potential, Chinese AI remains on the eve of explosion. "AI is the greatest certainty of the next twenty years" — this conviction also guides the shift in Qiming's next-stage investment focus.
Over the past few years, Qiming has systematically deployed across the infrastructure layer from compute power to large models. Now, as the technology stack becomes increasingly mature, the team is directing more resources toward the application layer. Qiming judges that "the future of AI application investment will be wonderfully colorful," with a batch of native applications and super platforms about to rise.
AI is penetrating thousands of industries. In vertical domains such as healthcare, education, and hardware, its restructuring effects will be particularly significant. In the AI+healthcare direction, William Hu, Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, states: "Over the next twenty years, artificial intelligence applications may transform many industries and ecosystems, especially AI's penetration into healthcare, which will comprehensively improve the quality and efficiency of medical services. We hope to participate in this."
"Artificial intelligence will benefit the world over the next 20 years, and Chinese entrepreneurs and technology innovators will play a very important role in it," Kuang emphasizes. As a deep deployer in this wave of technological transformation, Qiming's vision has never stopped at domestic boundaries — especially on AI, the certain track of the next 20 years, they are marching shoulder-to-shoulder with a cohort of globally competitive Chinese innovators, jointly writing this grand narrative concerning the direction of the future.
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Qiming Venture Partners was founded in 2006. Currently, Qiming Venture Partners manages 11 USD funds and 7 RMB funds, with total committed capital reaching $9.5 billion. Since its establishment, the firm has focused on investing in outstanding enterprises in the early and growth stages of Technology and Healthcare industries.
To date, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in over 580 high-growth innovative companies, of which more than 210 have listed on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, Shanghai Stock Exchange, and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or exited through M&A and other means, with more than 80 companies recognized as unicorns or super-unicorns by the industry.
Among Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio companies, many have grown into the most influential companies in their respective fields, including Xiaomi (01810.HK), Meituan (03690.HK), Bilibili (NASDAQ:BILI, 09626.HK), Zhihu (NYSE:ZH, 02390.HK), Roborock (688169.SH), Hesai Technology (NASDAQ:HSAI, 02525.HK), UBTECH (09880.HK), WeRide (NASDAQ:WRD, 00800.HK), HyperStrong (688411.SH), Insta360 (688775.SH), Unisound (09678.HK), Biren Technology (06082.HK), Zhipu AI (02513.HK), Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals (603087.SH), Tigermed (300347.SZ, 03347.HK), Zai Lab (NASDAQ:ZLAB, 09688.HK), CanSino Biologics (688185.SH, 06185.HK), Schrödinger (NASDAQ:SDGR), MicroPort EP MedTech (688617.SH), Sanyou Medical (688085.SH), Amoy Diagnostics (300685.SZ), Sinocelltech (688520.SH), Insilico Medicine (03696.HK), Hepb Therapeutics, Yuanxin Technology, MediLink Therapeutics, LaNova Medicines, StepFun, among others.