Rongbao · November | Yatsen Holding and Ucommune successfully list on US equities, Nuro closes Series C funding

About Rongbao: Rongbao is a monthly digest that brings together noteworthy updates and insights from Gaorong Ventures and its portfolio companies. Each issue shares just ten items — covering important funding news and milestones, but also highlighting new trends, creations, and perspectives. As Gaorong works toward its vision of "creating" a better life, we believe every step of innovation brings infinite possibilities.

New Brand · Perfect Diary Parent Yatsen Holdings Successfully Lists on NYSE, Becoming First US-Listed Chinese Beauty Group

On November 19 Beijing time, Yatsen Holdings, parent company of Perfect Diary, officially debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol "YSG," becoming the first US-listed Chinese beauty group. The IPO priced at $10.50 per ADS, with a total offering of 58.75 million American depositary shares. The stock surged 75.24% above its IPO price on the first trading day, pushing its market cap past $10 billion. Founded in 2016, Yatsen Holdings currently owns four high-growth color cosmetics and skincare brands: Perfect Diary, Little Ondine, Abby's Choice, and the French heritage brand Galénic. Its official accounts across all platforms have amassed over 48 million followers. Gaorong Ventures led Yatsen's investment round in early 2018 and continued to back the company through multiple subsequent rounds.

Over the past few years, Yatsen has steadily built out its beauty brand portfolio. Perfect Diary, born in 2017, was the group's first color cosmetics brand. With the philosophy of "beauty without limits, within reach," Perfect Diary develops high-quality, well-designed, easy-to-use makeup products for a new generation of women, quickly rising to become a leading domestic emerging brand. In 2020, Perfect Diary's cumulative Double 11 sales exceeded 600 million yuan, securing the top spot on Tmall's color cosmetics ranking for the second consecutive year. Meanwhile, Yatsen has accelerated the integration of online and offline channels. As of September 30, 2020, Yatsen operated over 200 Perfect Diary offline experience stores across more than 90 cities in China.

New Infrastructure · Ucommune Successfully Lists on Nasdaq, Becoming First Coworking Stock

Ucommune held its listing ceremony on November 24, following its merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Orisun Acquisition Corp. It began trading on the Nasdaq Exchange on November 18, 2020 under ticker symbol "UK," becoming the "first coworking stock." Upon completion of the listing, Ucommune expects to receive at least $66.5 million in investment, with investors including Xiaomi subsidiary Green Better Limited and Hong Kong-listed Sunshine 100 China. Ucommune was founded by Qingqing Mao in 2015. Gaorong Ventures invested in Ucommune's Series A round in September 2015.

Ucommune has become the domestic coworking leader. As of June 30, 2020, its coworking spaces spanned 47 cities with 185 workspaces — double the market share of its nearest competitor. Additionally, Ucommune pioneered an asset-light model, partnering with building owners to save on upfront development costs while empowering properties with advanced operations expertise and professional management technology to accelerate expansion.

Autonomous Driving · Nuro Announces $500 Million Series C

Recently, global autonomous driving leader Nuro announced a $500 million Series C round led by top-tier global investment firm T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., with participation from multiple new and existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, LLC, Tesla major institutional shareholder Baillie Gifford, SoftBank Vision Fund I, and Greylock. Following this round, the company will continue focusing on advancing its technology, product development, and commercial deployment. To date, Nuro has raised over $1.5 billion. Gaorong Ventures, NetEase founder Lei Ding, and ZhenFund participated in Nuro's Series A round.

Nuro designs and develops fully autonomous delivery vehicles. Its second-generation unmanned delivery vehicle, R2, supports transporting a wide variety of items including takeout, fresh groceries, general merchandise, pharmaceuticals, and retail products — bringing consumers greater convenience, more purchasing channels, safer roads, and reduced carbon emissions. Nuro has established partnerships with leading retailers across sectors, including Domino's, Walmart, and CVS. This year, Nuro achieved a significant technical milestone by testing fully driverless R2 vehicles on public roads in cities across California, Texas, and Arizona — with no driver, no passenger, and no chase vehicle.

Smart Parking · AIPARK Closes Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Series D

Recently, AI-powered static traffic and smart parking leader AIPARK completed a Series D round of hundreds of millions of RMB, led by Shenzhen Capital Group. Gaorong Ventures first invested in AIPARK in 2017 and led its Series C round in June this year. AIPARK has pioneered a dual B2B/B2C wheel drive model: building market moats through city-level deployments that provide solid support for commercial growth, while accelerating scenario penetration and user mindshare through a dense network of social parking lots — gradually covering all urban parking scenarios. AIPARK was the first to apply overhead video recognition technology to urban smart parking and static traffic order management, providing diverse product solutions for both roadside public parking spaces and commercial social parking lots. Currently, AIPARK's city-level smart parking solutions have been commercially deployed in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Chengdu, Fuzhou, Guiyang, Lanzhou, Xining, Shijiazhuang, Handan, Zhangjiakou, Bozhou, Tangshan, and other cities. AIPARK is the only AI enterprise in China's static traffic sector certified by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and recently won first prize in the 2020 "Maker China" Industrial Internet SME Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

Satellite Internet · GalaxySpace Closes New Funding Round, Accelerating China's Satellite Internet Buildout

Recently, satellite internet leader GalaxySpace announced the completion of its latest funding round at a post-money valuation of nearly 8 billion RMB, becoming China's first unicorn in commercial aerospace and satellite internet. The round was led by Nantong Development Zone Intelligent Manufacturing Industry Investment Fund, with participation from multiple new and existing investors. In 2018, Gaorong Ventures invested in two consecutive rounds for GalaxySpace. Following this round, the company will continue investing in satellite internet R&D and rapidly build low-cost, mass manufacturing capabilities for next-generation internet satellites to support China's satellite internet construction.

On January 16, 2020, GalaxySpace launched its first satellite — not only China's first low-orbit broadband communications satellite with 24Gbps communication capacity, but also the only broadband internet satellite currently in orbit developed by a private Chinese company. GalaxySpace's self-developed second broadband communications satellite has now entered final assembly. Going forward, GalaxySpace will focus on building a next-generation satellite intelligent manufacturing super-factory in Nantong, targeting annual production of 300–500 satellites.

Low-Code · Aozhe Closes 200 Million RMB Series B+, Leading Domestic Low-Code Digital Services

Recently, Aozhe completed a 200 million RMB Series B+ round, continuing to lead the domestic low-code digital enterprise services sector. Gaorong Ventures led Aozhe's Series B round in March 2019 and continued to invest in this round. Aozhe is a leading low-code digital platform service provider dedicated to helping enterprises and organizations achieve digital transformation through low-code technology. Aozhe has established a comprehensive product matrix with two core offerings: Trident Cloud and Aozhe Cloud Hub. Trident Cloud, built on the DingTalk ecosystem, targets citizen developers and addresses SME digitalization needs with quick onboarding, rapid development, and ease of use. Aozhe Cloud Hub targets professional developers for more complex projects or large enterprises, partnering with PaaS vendors on ecosystem expansion to help enterprises build robust technology platforms and achieve full-process, comprehensive, DevOps-integrated digital solutions. Aozhe has served over 100,000 enterprise organizations, 40% of which are Fortune China 500 companies and industry benchmark enterprises. It has accumulated rich foundational templates and vertical industry solutions across fast-moving consumer goods, real estate, finance, energy, government affairs, and other sectors, as well as hundreds of application scenarios.

Robotics · Flexiv's First 100 Adaptive Robots Roll Off Production Line

On November 17, the first batch of 100 Flexiv adaptive robots rolled off the production line at Flexiv's South China manufacturing center, marking the official entry of adaptive robots into large-scale mass production. The Rizon, independently developed and manufactured by Flexiv, is the world's first adaptive robot. It deeply integrates industrial-grade force control, machine vision, and AI technology, breaking through the limitations of traditional robots that can only perform fixed trajectory-based tasks in structured environments. Adaptive robots can adapt to uncertain working environments and complete complex tasks through human-like hand-eye coordination, significantly enhancing flexibility and productivity in manufacturing. The company provides one-stop solutions for plug-and-play assembly, curved surface operations, material handling, and other application scenarios for enterprise users in automotive, electronics/3C, general industry, medical, and logistics sectors.

Flexiv has achieved high levels of self-developed technology across underlying sensors, servo systems, core mechanical components, safety main control boards, robot operating systems, and AI systems, while also completing high localization of its supply chain. In 2020, Flexiv successfully established business partnerships with leading enterprises in 3C electronics and automotive manufacturing, deploying and applying adaptive robots in precision assembly, grinding and polishing, and other production links — effectively improving production line yield rates and flexibility, with some applications already achieving batch replication. Flexiv also announced a new addition to its Rizon adaptive robot family: Rizon 4s. Building on the Rizon 4, the 4s incorporates more advanced built-in sensors, giving the robot finer force sensing and control capabilities, stronger anti-interference performance, and multi-point force control.

Big Memory Computing · MemVerge Sweeps Six #1 Leadership Rankings in IT BRAND PULSE "Big Memory Software"

Recently, global authoritative flash storage analysis firm IT BRAND PULSE released its latest annual brand leadership survey for flash products. Big memory computing pioneer MemVerge earned #1 rankings in all six subcategories of "Big Memory Software." IT BRAND PULSE added the "Big Memory Software" category for the first time this year, and MemVerge — the creator of "big memory computing" — was selected as the leader across all six细分指标.

In September this year, MemVerge officially launched Memory Machine™ software. The powerful combination of Memory Machine™ software and Intel Optane persistent memory hardware fundamentally transforms memory computing infrastructure. As the industry's first software-defined memory pool composed of DRAM and persistent memory, Memory Machine™ deploys simply and is fully compatible with applications. The MemVerge team was first to extend the performance limits of persistent memory, delivering DRAM-like speed and making the impossible possible. At the same time, MemVerge provides enterprise-grade in-memory data services, transforming decades-old, fragile DRAM memory layers into new, highly available memory layers. Enterprises worldwide have begun deploying Memory Machine™ to harness the power of big memory.

Recognition · 4 Gaorong Portfolio Companies Named to MIT Technology Review's 50 Smartest Companies

At the EmTech China 2020 global emerging technology summit held on November 19, MIT Technology Review released its annual "50 Smartest Companies" list (TR50), selecting 50 companies from thousands of global technology firms to map the future technology landscape. Four Gaorong portfolio companies made the list:

Pinduoduo Inc.
For deeply integrating internet, big data, and AI technologies with agriculture, effectively helping transform traditional agriculture into digital agriculture and enabling farm products to reach consumers directly from the source.

Xbiome (Unknown)
As China's first gut microbiome AI drug discovery company, Unknown has developed predictive models using gut microbiome biomarkers for predicting tumor patient response to PD-1 therapy, achieving internationally leading prediction accuracy.

QitanTech
The first Chinese high-tech company to successfully independently develop fourth-generation nanopore gene sequencers and stably obtain sequencing data, filling the domestic gap in next-generation gene sequencing technology and bringing point-of-care gene sequencing into every household.

GalaxySpace
A practitioner of China's domestic Starlink plan. As a complement to ground-based cellular networks, low-orbit broadband communications satellite constellations have become an important arena for great power competition, with frequency bands and orbital slots growing increasingly contested. GalaxySpace represents a small step forward for China's private commercial aerospace sector.

On November 27, global financial publication Barron's Chinese edition, in partnership with Caijing and Tiger Brokers, released the "2020 Chinese Concept Stock Investment Value Report," with Gaorong Ventures named to the "2020 Top 20 Most Influential Investment Institutions." Recently, Gaorong Ventures also received "2020 Top 10 Most Industry-Influential" from Lei Feng Network's medical technology best investment institutions list, and "2020 Top 10 Cultural Consumption Investment Institutions" from Sansheng.

Ronghui · Capital Strategy Salon Series Explores Opportunities Under Registration-Based IPO System

As China's capital market enters its "thirties," with the STAR Market and registration-based IPO system coming online, capital market reform continues to deepen. Innovative enterprises standing before this new capital opportunity need to deeply understand the internal logic and reform trends of China's capital market development, and think about their future from a capital markets perspective. In November, Gaorong Ventures · Ronghui, in partnership with Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance's Global Entrepreneur Leadership Program and SVB Financial Group, hosted a capital strategy salon series. Invited speakers included An QingSong, Secretary of the Party Committee and Executive Vice Chairman of the Securities Association of China; Jiang Yu, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of Huatai United Securities; and Zhong Yan, Managing Director of SVB Financial Group. They shared practical insights on topics including China's capital market practice and thinking, the path to listing for innovative enterprises under the registration system, and new financing approaches for science and technology enterprises.