After Raising Over 400 Million, This B2B Company Rejected the Grand Startup Narrative | Linear Voice

In today's white-hot AI investment climate, everyone tends to fixate on the new wave of AI founders. Meanwhile, companies that began applying artificial intelligence years earlier seem to occupy the periphery of market attention.

So for an eight-year-old B2B company that has survived both高光 moments and低谷 trials to close a Series C round exceeding $60 million this year, that resilience carries rare value.

Recently, Waves sat down with Jerry Yesheng, founder of Whale, to discuss the story behind this funding round, new product plans, and lessons learned from years of doing business across the globe. Linear Capital led Whale's Pre-A round as the sole investor and has continued to back the company through multiple subsequent rounds.

In 2025, talking about SaaS companies may seem passé — but what if this eight-year-old B2B firm, having weathered boom and bust, just raised $60 million in Series C funding?

Probably still untimely, especially as AI founders fresh to the industry announce their world-changing ambitions. But in Jerry's view, changing the world is secondary — "making money" comes first.

Though he often appears cheerful and jokingly calls himself the company's "CAO" (Chief Apology Officer), our three-hour conversation was peppered with provocative takes. He believes general-purpose agents will become obsolete because he's trained every business development staffer at Whale to build agents: "An agent is like someone helping you make a PowerPoint — is the presentation's value in its aesthetics or in what's written on the slides?" He started building hardware from day one, a decision investors disliked that serendipitously became the SaaS company's "moat" eight years later. He considers business model the core strategic determinant of a company's success, arguing that "business itself is a hard science, sometimes even more complex than chips."

Hearing this, one begins to understand why, amid today's frenzied AI fundraising, it was this founder of a B2B company operating in the margins who secured the capital.

Last month, Whale announced the completion of its C1 and C2 rounds totaling over $60 million, with investors including Temasek, Linear Capital, Bosch Ventures, MTR Lab, Telkom Indonesia, Singtel, and SM Prime, the Philippines' largest retail conglomerate. Previous investors in Whale include NIO Capital, Source Code Capital, BAI Capital, and Alpha Startups.

On this occasion, Waves spoke with Jerry about his new product roadmap and insights from years of global business operations. The conversation follows:

Waves: Describe Whale in one sentence.

Jerry: We define ourselves as enterprise AI for business — helping clients implement AI within a vertical domain.

Waves: You recently launched a series of AI products. Specifically, which vertical domains?

Jerry: For example, Singapore's oldest local bank equips its tellers with our smart badges. Through 480,000 hours of monthly recording and AI analysis, we enable sales script training, customer analysis, and potential customer rating. We also have Yumo, an enterprise AI knowledge base, among other products.

Waves: All AI-related. Is this a necessary move or posture for all SaaS companies facing AI disruption?

Jerry: AI is infrastructure-level transformation. When you meet clients today, if your company has no AI component, clients won't choose you. In a sense, this is also a democratization — it brings many companies back to the same starting line. Most SaaS companies are currently rushing to build agents.

Waves: But everyone is building applications. Why did you choose to do hardware?

Jerry: Good question. We started hardware from day one, and this was actually why many investors didn't favor me. Initially, I was young and fearless, thinking hardware development could be fast. It's not. Hardware development cycles are measured in years because, compared to applications, a hardware bug causes far greater damage. But looking back now, a company that's been building hardware for eight years has supply chain capabilities no newcomer can match. Even if someone tried to replicate us, my speed would still be much faster.

Waves: Many companies from other industries have recently pivoted to launch AI products. For these "crossover" companies, is AI a buzzword or genuinely effective?

Jerry: I view this in reverse. I produce what customers need — it just happens to carry the "AI" prefix today. We've been making enterprise cameras for six or seven years, and badges for four or five. The latter originally relied on ASR plus small models. What used to take a month now takes five minutes — that's the core difference.

Waves: So your product offering hasn't changed; AI has just improved your production efficiency?

Jerry: Exactly. For all these years, the world's needs haven't changed — eating, drinking, living. AI has only changed the tools of production.

Waves: This $60 million funding round includes predominantly Southeast Asian investors. Why raise in Southeast Asia? Are Southeast Asian institutions bullish on Chinese SaaS companies?

Jerry: First, B2B and AI companies are relatively scarce in Southeast Asia, because it's difficult for the region to produce globally oriented companies natively. Moreover, many Southeast Asian institutional investors have returned from the US or have been influenced by Western business models to some degree — they favor technology-driven, replicable business models.

Waves: What was the valuation?

Jerry: Asian companies trade at far lower valuations than American ones, so we plan to expand into Japan and Western markets this year. If you can go global and reach Europe and America, as American investors would put it, all Asian companies look "particularly cheap."

Waves: Despite being a global company, your investor mix seems somewhat complex — Chinese USD funds, Singapore sovereign wealth funds, Indonesian and European corporate venture arms, and so on.

Jerry: Anyone who actually does business knows money is money — only brand matters. When I fundraise in Southeast Asia, simply saying I'm backed by Temasek, backed by Telkom Indonesia, makes scheduling meetings very smooth.

Waves: You now have an office in Southeast Asia. What's it like doing business in Indonesia?

Jerry: Many things in Indonesia are more "flexible" than in China — this applies to most Southeast Asian countries except Singapore.

Waves: How many people does your company have globally now?

Jerry: About 200.

Waves: Many companies are now trying to operate with leaner organizational structures.

Jerry: My new understanding of organization is that small and elite teams are viable. Simply put, everyone does everything, rather than each person being assigned their own tasks. This way, know-how can actually accumulate at the company level. For instance, we require every BD to have the ability to build agents, because an agent is like having someone make your PowerPoint — but what matters in a PowerPoint isn't the polished slides, it's what words are written on them.

Waves: Does this make being a boss harder or easier?

Jerry: Easier. Previously, information degraded layer by layer — now that problem disappears. Everyone's an owner.

Waves: Whether it's SaaS or B2B in China, it always sounds difficult. What do you think is the fundamental reason?

Jerry: B2C is a traffic business; B2B is a service logic. The former demands extremely high product quality, and traffic costs are also high. The latter emphasizes deep service and long-term partnership — it's hard to generate positive revenue in the short term, requires extensive travel early on, and places high demands on individuals.

But B2B business, especially with AI layered on top, is never a zero-or-one proposition. Even large models can't achieve 100% accuracy — they might solve 95% of a client's problems, and that remaining 5% is where our value lies. Including emotional value. I often call myself the CAO, Chief Apology Officer (laughs).

Waves: You studied neuroscience at Caltech, where Fei-Fei Li was your direct senior. Why did you choose to return to China and start a SaaS/B2B company?

Jerry: Studying neuroscience, chips, or other deep tech — in my view, the difficulty is comparable to studying business. People instinctively assume things far from them are difficult, while everyday activities like business seem simple. But precisely because business is practical, ROI is easier to calculate and easier to execute. So I believe the deeper the technology, the less profitable it tends to be. The most profitable model is essentially the agency/operations company model. Our industry sits at the intersection of technology and operations — technology is needed to transform the industry, yet the industry itself is close enough to ROI. That was my logic for choosing this path.

Waves: Usually when people discuss their entrepreneurial motivations, they give more emotional, grandiose answers.

Jerry: The essence of business is making money. I understand many founders say they want to do something cool, but probably 90% of cool things don't make money.

I've always felt that many entrepreneurs see things and worry about problems that only the top 0.01% of the world thinks about — most people don't think this way. That's why you'll find, especially in consumer sectors, the best entrepreneurs often aren't the smartest or most highly educated. For example, no large restaurant chain that has truly scaled is genuinely health-centered, because for most people, cheap comes first.

Waves: What about large models? From a business model perspective, is it a good business?

Jerry: The large model business is fundamentally very similar to cloud providers — and we all know that's a very tough business model. Large models are essentially a hardware business model, asset-heavy. Comparatively, NVIDIA, which sells them cards, has a good business.

Waves: Why do you dislike the word "moat"?

Jerry: Because it's frequently misinterpreted. Technology is not a moat. Customer resources are not a moat. There is only one moat in the world: "scale up." And for a startup to begin scaling, it must quickly identify changes in the market. This is my advice to many friends who have recently started companies and come to me for guidance.

Waves: What do you mean by quickly identifying changes in the market?

Jerry: The changes I'm referring to aren't those brought by AI. AI has spawned many new companies, but these companies will quickly fail if they haven't found a market. What I mean are systemic market changes like those brought by new energy vehicles — for example, the complete revolution of old car sales models and methods. We can now see that the entire new energy supply chain, from top to bottom, has produced many good companies. CATL is one example — it had accumulated capabilities before and rapidly scaled up upon entering the new energy era. As an aside, I've been saying that Trump brings exactly what entrepreneurs need most: change. He's a typical businessman. His daily "ups and downs" create many opportunities.

Waves: So you view the measures since Trump's return as opportunities?

Jerry: People often feel the business environment is declining, but it's precisely during such periods that some companies truly rise. Short video and short drama content going overseas are typical examples of sectors that grew amid change — if international trade were smooth, companies might have stuck to traditional trade. The advantage of this short video content lies precisely in not depending on tariffs. Find the right entry point, execute quickly, add mature AI technology, and natural growth follows.

People think tariffs are a problem now, but you can still make money going to America — and with higher margins. The US auto industry itself has very high profit margins. Even with 200% tariffs on Chinese products, you can still profit because competition has decreased. If there were originally ten Chinese companies competing, now there are only two or three. The competitive logic hasn't changed, but there are seven fewer competitors. You'll find that the best markets to operate in now are the ones no one is in — we can seize first-mover advantage. If we price higher now, no one cares, no one minds, we still make money.

From my perspective, many people talk about going global without having actually gone, especially in B2B. I think B2C is slightly better because it has mature industrial chains — locals will help you open stores, handle local affairs; whether you make money depends on your capability. But B2B requires you to go yourself. It's hard. Many people haven't made that commitment.