Xi Cao

Xi Cao is a founding partner of Monolith砺思资本, the investment firm he co-founded with Tim Wang in 2021 after leaving Sequoia Capital China, where he had spent over a decade and also managed the firm's seed fund . Monolith operates across primary and secondary markets with a focus on next-generation digital industries and technology manufacturing, and had reached nearly $800 million in AUM by early 2023 .

Cao has built a track record of early bets in several of China's most prominent tech companies. He was an early investor in Kuaishou, the short-video platform whose 2021 IPO made it briefly China's fifth-largest internet company by market cap , as well as in Unitree, the robotics firm, and Moonshot AI . These deals helped him debut on the Forbes Midas List in 2025 at global No. 39, then climb to No. 38 in 2026—ranking second among Chinese investors on that list .

In his investment approach, Cao has described looking for founders with unusual steadiness and room to grow, recalling one 2002-born entrepreneur he backed whose motivation came from wanting to raise money to take his robotics team to compete abroad . As Monolith itself has grown—the firm raised $488 million in new funding as of late 2025 —Cao has also begun engaging with younger audiences, speaking at Tsinghua and Peking University about entrepreneurship and venture capital .