Qiming Weekly: 10 Portfolio Company Updates, Vol. 02, Jan. 20, 2026
Celebrating milestone moments with Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio companies
Editor's Note: In 2026, the Qiming Weekly gets a fresh upgrade. Updated every week, it features just ten handpicked highlights from Qiming Venture Partners portfolio companies — covering funding milestones and breakthrough developments.
Every step entrepreneurs take in the wave of technology and innovation deserves to be recorded. Qiming Venture Partners will continue accelerating and empowering founders, and we invite you to follow along as we track these milestone moments together.
Funding News
Natural Selection Raises Over $30 Million
AI companion company Natural Selection recently announced it has completed a new funding round exceeding $30 million. Qiming Venture Partners co-led the investment.
Natural Selection's EVE, which entered its first public test in mid-2025, presented the industry with an entirely new product form for AI companionship — redefining "AI companion" across five dimensions: Proactive: rejecting passive responses in favor of independent, initiative-driven care; Dual-Intelligence "Human-ness": using agent-based dialogue to deliver both high emotional and cognitive intelligence, breaking free from the "machine-like" feel; SOTA Long-Term Memory: remembering details and context with human-intuitive recall and forgetting mechanisms; High Immersion: introducing 3D visuals and gamified design to dramatically enhance presence and engagement; Dimension-Crossing Agent: integrating real-life services to genuinely intervene in and simplify users' daily lives.
Natural Selection has created a dedicated "Emotional Interaction Designer" role to boost its AI's emotional intelligence. The company also released Echo-N1, its first emotional foundation model, introducing an entirely new "emotional model training methodology" along with a benchmark specifically designed to measure emotional intelligence — the first application of reinforcement learning to the subjective emotional domain. Following EVE's debut, the memory system received continuous upgrades. As early as 2024, the Natural Selection team proposed a long-term memory solution with 128 dynamic memory slots; by 2025, they had added multi-dimensional GraphRAG to the memory architecture.
Shiyu Wang, Partner at Qiming Venture Partners, commented: "Natural Selection is building an entirely new interactive experience through proactive agent paradigms — one that naturally accumulates user context and memory, deeply integrated with gamified design."
Major Partnerships
01/ UBTECH Partners with Global Aviation Giant Airbus
European aviation leader Airbus recently signed a humanoid robot service agreement with UBTECH (09880.HK), a Qiming portfolio company and the "first humanoid robot stock." Airbus has purchased UBTECH's latest industrial humanoid robot, Walker S2, for its manufacturing facilities, and the two parties will jointly expand the deployment of humanoid robots in aviation manufacturing scenarios.
This partnership with Airbus marks a significant step for UBTECH following its strategic collaboration last year with American semiconductor giant Texas Instruments. The company has now gradually extended its humanoid robot applications from Chinese industrial settings to five major global scenarios: aviation manufacturing, automotive manufacturing, 3C electronics manufacturing, smart logistics, and semiconductor manufacturing. The industrial application value of humanoid robots as new-quality productive forces continues to expand.
In 2025, UBTECH's humanoid robot orders totaled over 1.4 billion RMB, leading globally. In 2026, UBTECH's industrial humanoid robot production capacity will reach the ten-thousand-unit scale. Beyond the domestic Chinese market, UBTECH is also beginning to expand into overseas manufacturing markets in Europe and the United States.
02/ Insilico Medicine's Nach01 Multimodal Foundation Model Deployed on Microsoft Discovery
Insilico Medicine (03696.HK), a Qiming portfolio company and clinical-stage biotech firm powered by generative AI, announced that its Nach01 multimodal foundation model has completed deployment on Microsoft Discovery. The integration was demonstrated and introduced in depth at a Microsoft-hosted session during the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
Microsoft Discovery is an AI-powered scientific research platform launched by Microsoft in 2025, primarily serving enterprises and research institutions. Nach01 extends and synthesizes the capabilities of Nach0 and Nach0-pc, achieving an innovative fusion of natural language processing and advanced chemical intelligence. Nach01 features 2D and 3D information prediction capabilities, with application scenarios spanning hundreds of differentiated tasks including synthetic route prediction and ADMET property prediction. Additionally, Nach01 supports training, fine-tuning, and inference based on users' proprietary data.
This integration of Nach01 into Microsoft Discovery not only highlights the platform's high compatibility and extensibility for third-party AI models, but also provides a replicable practical example for research institutions deploying AI-driven intelligent drug discovery workflows. During the demonstration, multi-step research processes running on Microsoft Azure's cloud environment showed advantages in greater operational transparency, improved result reproducibility, and flexible scalable deployment — helping research teams streamline and accelerate drug discovery in a standardized, traceable manner.
03/ Zhipu AI and Huawei Open-Source First SOTA Multimodal Model Trained on Domestic Chips
Zhipu AI (02513.HK), a Qiming portfolio company, recently partnered with Huawei to open-source GLM-Image, a next-generation image generation model. The model completed the full pipeline from data to training on Huawei's Ascend Atlas 800T A2 hardware and MindSpore AI framework, making it the first SOTA multimodal model trained entirely on domestic Chinese chips. GLM-Image adopts an independently innovated "autoregressive + diffusion decoder" hybrid architecture, achieving integration between image generation and language models — an important exploration by Zhipu toward the new "cognitive generation" technology paradigm represented by Nano Banana Pro.
Key highlights include: Architectural Innovation: The novel "autoregressive + diffusion encoder" hybrid architecture balances global instruction comprehension with local detail rendering, overcoming generation challenges in knowledge-intensive scenarios such as posters, presentations, and educational diagrams — an important step toward exploring next-generation "knowledge + reasoning" cognitive generation models represented by Nano Banana Pro; Domestic Full-Stack Training: The model's autoregressive structural base was built on Huawei Ascend Atlas 800T A2 hardware and MindSpore AI framework, completing the full pipeline from data preprocessing to large-scale training, validating the feasibility of training frontier models on domestic full-stack computing infrastructure; Open-Source SOTA Text Rendering: Ranked first among open-source models on CVTG-2K (complex visual text generation) and LongText-Bench (long text rendering) leaderboards, with particular strength in Chinese character generation; Cost-Performance and Speed Optimization: In API mode, image generation costs just 0.1 RMB per image, with an optimized speed version coming soon.
R&D Progress
01/ Shanghai Yaoying Hospital's First "Huihubao" CAR-T Patient Successfully Completes Treatment and Is Discharged
Shanghai Yaoying Hospital recently completed CAR-T cell therapy for a blood cancer patient supported by "Huihubao" (Shanghai's inclusive supplementary medical insurance), marking a deep integration of CAR-T therapy application with diversified payment mechanisms for Qiming portfolio company Yaoying Medical — providing more patients with accessible innovative treatment options.
Shanghai Yaoying Hospital is one of the designated hospitals for "Huihubao" CAR-T cell therapy. The patient who received treatment under "Huihubao" support was a nearly octogenarian Chinese patient with multiple myeloma, diagnosed over six years ago, who had received multiple rounds of chemotherapy with subsequent disease progression, and underwent BCMA CAR-T cell therapy at Shanghai Yaoying Hospital. Thanks to "Huihubao" coverage, the patient was able to rapidly initiate treatment after prepayment, significantly reducing out-of-pocket cost burden, and was soon discharged with ideal recovery.
Prior to this first "Huihubao" insured patient's successful CAR-T treatment completion, Shanghai Yaoying Hospital had already received consultations from over 100 international patients, with nearly 30 blood cancer patients having completed CAR-T cell collection/reinfusion. Long-term follow-up has shown good outcomes with complete disease remission, demonstrating the high-quality medical standards of Yaoying Medical's CAR-T cell therapy team. Meanwhile, Yaoying Medical has established comprehensive service workflows to efficiently serve global patients, providing high-quality, personalized treatment solutions for blood cancer patients at home and abroad.
02/ Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals' Changxiulin®/Ondibta® Receives EU Commission Marketing Authorization
Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals (603087.SH), a Qiming portfolio company, and its European wholly-owned subsidiary Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals Europe GmbH announced that the company's self-developed insulin glargine injection (EU brand name: Ondibta®; China brand name: Changxiulin®) has recently received approval from the European Commission (EC) for the treatment of diabetes in adults, adolescents, and children aged 2 years and above. This approval marks Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals' official entry into the European market, with the product to be marketed in the European Union (EU), Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
European Commission (EC) certification is a critical market access qualification for pharmaceuticals entering international markets. Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals' self-developed insulin glargine injection is the first Chinese insulin glargine analog to receive scientific recognition from an EU drug regulatory authority, marking that the company's product development standards and quality management systems have fully aligned with world-class international benchmarks.
Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals' self-developed insulin glargine injection is a long-acting basal insulin with over twenty years on the market. Currently registered in more than 20 countries, its outstanding efficacy and safety are supported by extensive clinical evidence and have earned the high trust of medical professionals and patients worldwide through long-term real-world use.
03/
Zai Lab Announces NMPA Approval of Augtyro® (Repotrectinib) for NTRK-Positive Solid Tumor Patients
Zai Lab (NASDAQ: ZLAB, 09688.HK), a Qiming portfolio company, announced that China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has approved the supplemental new drug application (sNDA) for Augtyro® (repotrectinib) for the treatment of adult patients with solid tumors harboring neurotrophic tyrosine receptor kinase (NTRK) gene fusion. These patients have locally advanced or metastatic solid tumors or tumors where surgical resection would likely result in severe morbidity, and have progressed following prior treatment or have no satisfactory alternative therapy.
Dr. Rafael G. Amado, President and Global Head of R&D at Zai Lab, stated: "We are pleased that the NMPA has approved Augtyro® for patients with NTRK-positive solid tumors. This marks the second indication approved for this product in China, filling an important treatment gap. Previously, no targeted therapy approved in China could simultaneously address both TKI-naïve and TKI-pretreated patients in this category. We believe this approval will help address the highly unmet medical needs of these patients."
04/
Pulnovo Medical's PADN Approved for Sale in Saudi Arabia
Following completion of the high-threshold EU CE-MDR certification and commercialization in the UAE last year, Pulnovo Medical, a Qiming portfolio company, has secured medical device registration in Saudi Arabia for its PADN product series — marking the first Chinese original technology for pulmonary arterial hypertension treatment to enter the Saudi market. This is not a simple extension of market reach, but a deliberate and forward-looking strategic move in the company's globalization journey.
CE-MDR represents not merely compliance itself, but an entire system of capabilities encompassing clinical evidence, risk control, quality systems, and lifecycle management. The real test lies in whether this capability can be repeatedly accepted across different healthcare systems, disease profiles, and regulatory frameworks. In this sense, CE-MDR was only the "first complete validation" of Pulnovo Medical's globalization capabilities. The Saudi registration represents a critical structural validation of these capabilities in an emerging market environment.
Technology Strength
01/
WeRide Launches "WeRide Chuxing" Mini Program
WeRide (NASDAQ: WRD, 00800.HK), a Qiming portfolio company and global leader in autonomous driving technology, has officially launched its Robotaxi ride-hailing mini program "WeRide Chuxing." Users no longer need to download a separate app — simply search for "WeRide Chuxing" on WeChat to hail a WeRide Robotaxi with one click in operational areas such as Guangzhou and Beijing, easily experiencing comfortable, safe, and convenient driverless mobility services.
From standalone app to WeChat mini program, WeRide is committed to bringing autonomous driving services into daily life scenarios through more flexible and convenient means. Leveraging WeChat's massive user base and high-frequency usage characteristics, the "WeRide Chuxing" mini program will significantly lower the barrier to experiencing Robotaxi services, enhancing user awareness of and trust in WeRide's driverless technology.
As of January 12, 2026, WeRide's global Robotaxi fleet has officially entered the "thousand-vehicle era." This is not merely a numerical milestone, but a critical step toward scaled commercialization of autonomous driving. Currently, WeRide Robotaxi has successfully deployed in over 10 core cities globally, achieving fully driverless commercial Robotaxi operations in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Abu Dhabi, with the Abu Dhabi fleet approaching per-vehicle profitability.
02/
Tashi Zhihang Launches "Embodied Intelligence Data Spark Initiative"
Tashi Zhihang, a Qiming portfolio company, has officially launched the "Embodied Intelligence Data Spark Initiative." The initiative will take Tashi Zhihang's globally pioneering Human-centric data paradigm as its cornerstone, building an open, shared, and mutually beneficial embodied intelligence data ecosystem — igniting the spark of industry development through the philosophy of "from one comes two, from three comes all things."
In its initial phase, the "Embodied Intelligence Data Spark Initiative" will aggregate over 10 million hours of standardized high-quality data, and through establishing secure, compliant, and efficient standards for data collection and sharing, drive toward 100 million hours of data sharing — fully unlocking the potential of industry data. Tashi Zhihang has already attracted leading enterprises from consumer electronics, intelligent manufacturing, and other sectors as partners, including Kupaosi, Guodi Shanghai, Lenovo, Lianbao, and C&D. The convergence of multi-industry scenario partners will ensure the data ecosystem covers broad application domains from industrial manufacturing to lifestyle services, from warehousing and logistics to multi-scenario operations — laying a solid foundation for embodied intelligence models with strong generalization capabilities. Wenchao Ding, Chief Scientist at Tashi Zhihang, noted: "Data sharing is not simply additive in volume; it breaks down individual barriers, providing the industry with a generalized, iterative intelligent foundation."
Past Issues
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 outstanding early and growth-stage companies in Technology and Healthcare innovation.
To date, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in over 580 high-growth innovative companies, with more than 210 exiting through listings on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, Shanghai Stock Exchange, and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or through mergers and acquisitions. 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), 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), Arbutus Biopharma, Yuanxin Technology, MediLink Therapeutics, LaNova Medicines, StepFun, and others.