Qiming View | Duane Kuang: The Time Is Ripe for Chinese Tech to Go Global
China's technology going global — the time is now. In the coming years, all kinds of our AI-related technologies will join this wave of going global as well. The trend of Chinese technology expanding worldwide is only just beginning.
Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase of development. Large language models continue to iterate, new intelligent agents keep emerging, and AI — alongside the internet and big data — is deeply integrating with the real economy, empowering every industry. As AI applications take hold in education, healthcare, and manufacturing, what transformations are underway? How competitive is China's homegrown tech on the global stage? At the China Development Forum 2025 Annual Meeting, Yicai spoke with Duane Kuang, Founding Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, on these topics.
Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
01/
AI Enters the 2.0 Era: What Breakthroughs?
Yicai: This year, DeepSeek has ignited widespread interest in AI applications. As venture capital investors, what is your investment thesis for this space?
Duane Kuang: AI has been developing in China for quite some time — Qiming Venture Partners has been investing in AI for at least a decade. From AI 1.0, with machine learning and deep learning, we saw deep learning produce many excellent applications in specific verticals: facial recognition, object detection, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and so on. What we now call AI 2.0 represents a major technical breakthrough — it's a form of general artificial intelligence. Large models aim to acquire broad human knowledge through pre-training. They then require only relatively modest further training or integration for specific scenarios to be rapidly deployed across many vertical applications.
Throughout this evolution, we've observed that U.S. investment in this area has been substantially higher than China's. So while we're very bullish on China's AI capabilities, talent, and future market prospects, we also harbored some concern: Could we truly reach the world stage's front ranks with such comparatively limited resources?
Over the years, companies here have been working toward this in various ways. Finally, one Chinese company showed the world that Chinese talent can indeed produce a world-class, rigorously validated product with relatively modest investment — and because it was released open-source to the world, this was truly the surprise DeepSeek brought to the industry and to the world.
At the same time, DeepSeek is not dramatically ahead of other comparable domestic companies. It is the first blossom to emerge from a very large, well-established foundation of Chinese AI development. Other Chinese peers will compete and catch up, releasing different and interesting new products. As investors, this is exactly the kind of flourishing entrepreneurial environment we most appreciate.
02/
"AI + Education, Healthcare, Manufacturing": What Transformations Will These Bring?
Yicai: In education, healthcare, and manufacturing, we're already seeing AI applications produce tangible results. What kind of industrial transformation will AI enable in these sectors?
Duane Kuang: AI large models can be applied to tutoring, enabling truly personalized instruction. A long-standing dilemma: if you wanted a renowned teacher, you could only get a large lecture class; if you wanted one-on-one attention, the teacher's quality might not be as strong. Scaling this commercial tension to a societal level, children across China's regions all have diverse learning desires and needs — how can we achieve educational equity and extend quality teaching resources to broader areas? Next-generation AI can deliver both renowned-teacher-level quality and customized, one-on-one instruction tailored to each student's immediate needs, with the ability to generate novel teaching approaches through interactive engagement.
We believe such AI tools will emerge in China in the near term, and that Chinese-developed technology of this kind can be widely applied globally. In the end, it's simply a matter of language conversion. Such Chinese enterprises will be meaningful to the entire world.
AI applications in healthcare actually started even earlier. Through large models and generative AI for molecular discovery, the industry has already seen fairly extensive adoption in new drug R&D. I believe that as large models continue maturing, this will gradually become a standard component of new drug development. Certain rare diseases, certain medical fortresses that have resisted conquest for years — these are very likely to be addressed with the help of this generation of AI.
Third, China is the world's factory. When we combine AI with robotics and machinery — a combination with both a brain and a cerebellum — this is regarded as one of the most promising and noteworthy directions for AI development in the coming period.
No matter how impressive technology performs in the lab, without extensive real-world application scenarios, it cannot rapidly develop and iterate. China has enormous advantages here. Including humanoid robots we've invested in that have already entered factories. Chinese manufacturing enterprises have the demand, and in embracing new technology, they are more willing and enthusiastic than their global peers.
These three areas will all be highly promising in China's future AI development landscape.
03/
How Globally Competitive Are China's Tech Products?
Yicai: Chinese enterprises' overall technological influence is also expanding globally. How do you view the growth of homegrown Chinese startups?
Duane Kuang: This is the best moment for Chinese tech products to go global. China has already built an excellent reputation worldwide in manufacturing — from 10-piece prototypes to 1 million units to 100 million units. But this capability has remained hidden behind brands, largely imperceptible to consumers. Where a product is manufactured, in the end, consumers don't feel that deeply. A major difference between tech products and consumer products is that tech products require a long time to gain acceptance — much longer than manufacturing location matters. But once a tech product's technological sophistication, user comfort, brand reputation, and design are accepted, its lifecycle is very long. In recent years, Chinese tech products have already reached levels of international reputation and acceptance fully comparable to when Japanese products entered global markets.
Our electric vehicles are entering global markets. China's battery technology isn't accepted because batteries made in China are cheaper than those made in Korea or elsewhere. It's because the battery technology here is already the most advanced globally.
So I believe the time is ripe for Chinese technology to go global. In coming years, various AI-related technologies will also join this trend toward global expansion. The trend of Chinese technology going global is only just beginning. Looking around the world, there are few places with such talent reserves, with such a massive domestic market where tech products can quickly enter the market for trials and iteration upon release. These phenomena and trends, I believe, will continue in the period ahead.
Source | Yicai
PAST HIGHLIGHTS
Founded in 2006, Qiming Venture Partners currently manages 11 USD funds and 7 RMB funds, with total assets under management reaching $9.5 billion. Since its inception, the firm has focused on investing in early and growth-stage outstanding enterprises in Technology and Consumer (T&C) and Healthcare sectors.
To date, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in over 580 high-growth innovative companies, of which more than 210 have gone public 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. Over 80 portfolio companies have become recognized unicorns or super-unicorns.
Many Qiming Venture Partners portfolio companies 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), UBTECH (09880.HK), WeRide (NASDAQ:WRD), 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), Berry Genomics (000710.SZ), Sinocelltech (688520.SH), Yuanxin Technology, ClinChoice, Belief BioMed, Biren Technology, among others.