Linear News | AI Frontier Tech Startup Mindverse Raises Angel Round in the Tens of Millions, Led by HSG with Co-Investment from Linear Capital and K2VC

36Kr has learned that AI frontier technology company Hangzhou Mindverse Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Mindverse") announced the completion of a tens of millions of RMB angel funding round, led by HSG with co-investment from Linear Capital and K2VC, with Yuanhe Capital serving as exclusive financial advisor. The proceeds will be used primarily for product R&D, team expansion, and market development.

Mindverse builds on the convergence of neuroscience and artificial intelligence to create, from first principles, digital minds with autonomous consciousness and reasoning capabilities — extending the paradigm for next-generation AI.

Human-level AI currently sits at the frontier of global academic research. Mindverse's proposed mind framework integrates perceptual and cognitive capabilities to enhance overall user experience, particularly in logical thinking and memory. It promises not only to dramatically deepen communication and even emotional connection between users and applications, but also represents the most viable path to novel interactive experiences.

Specifically, unlike traditional conversational virtual beings that rely on large-scale pretrained model frameworks, Mindverse's framework generates associative mechanisms during human interaction. On one hand, memorized information and environmental context become conversational material, driving the virtual being's autonomous thought planning. On the other, the pretraining approach provides a knowledge foundation that can further reduce requirements for data and compute.

"We hope to build an entirely new AI industry. The mind framework is an integrated framework that combines the brain's macro-level architecture with micro-level neural network capabilities," Fangbo Tao, founder and CEO of Mindverse, told 36Kr. "The mind framework can engage in macro-level thinking like humans, handle diverse tasks, and apply to various scenarios. It can serve not just as a chatbot for video conversations, but also leverage environmental and memorized information to support richer, more multifaceted interactive scenarios."

Currently, Mindverse focuses on Human-level AI virtual beings — an entirely new track where identity-type and service-type virtual beings have clear monetization paths, market potential, and numerous application scenarios. The internet's greatest native driving force has always come from younger generations. Current internet and mobile internet applications can no longer sustain the abundant creativity of Gen Z and Generation Alpha. In the new internet, virtual digital beings as the primary interactive medium of the Metaverse possess clear and substantial growth potential, with AR, VR, and digital collectibles creating unlimited imagination and extension space for them. According to calculations by LeadLeo Research Institute's Virtual Digital Being Deep Industry Report, China's overall virtual being market size is expected to reach 270 billion RMB by 2030.

Mindverse believes the metaverse represents the form of next-generation internet, but it is not merely about greater immersion. It will generate many novel connection relationships between humans and digital life, upon which new commercial forms can flow and create new value increments. Mindverse's vision is to have intelligent virtual beings accompany and serve every user in the metaverse. This new interaction will not only redefine service but also reconstruct certain commercial forms, enabling us to achieve better versions of ourselves and maximize our value in entirely new digital spaces.

On the commercial front, Mindverse has constructed a "Mind as a Service (MaaS)" business model, providing more vital intelligent services across broad virtual and real-world scenarios. Its upcoming MindOS platform can provide enterprises with customized virtual minds, empowering virtual beings to achieve maximum commercial value and brand appreciation. Through numerous industry-customized solutions that maximally address market demand, it will amplify product and virtual being IP value, enabling virtual beings to land in numerous application scenarios.

Since its angel round, Mindverse has partnered with multiple domestic top-tier virtual being IPs, reached preliminary cooperation intentions with a leading domestic virtual being company, a major domestic advertising agency, and an overseas metaverse project, and established cooperation intentions with multiple downstream enterprises possessing hundred-million-level user markets.

Mindverse was founded in January 2022 and was selected as a key project for Yuhang District's high-level talent innovation and entrepreneurship program in 2022. Founder Fangbo Tao holds a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied under Jiawei Han, founder of the data mining field. He previously worked at Microsoft Research, Facebook, and Alibaba. Co-founder Songqi Lin brings multinational, cross-industry executive experience, having led global new product R&D strategy at Facebook and global commercialization strategy at TikTok. The company's core team hails from leading universities including Tsinghua, Peking University, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Illinois, with R&D and executive backgrounds at top technology companies and research institutions including Facebook, Google, Alibaba, ByteDance, and NetEase.

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Linear Capital is a specialized investment institution focused on "Data Intelligence" and "Frontier Technology."

Linear Capital currently manages ten funds with total AUM of approximately US$2 billion.

We focus on early-stage projects in "Data Application," "Data Infrastructure," and "Frontier Technology" application areas. Our investment stage focuses on angel through Series A lead investments, with typical check sizes of US$3-8 million or RMB equivalent.

To date, we have made early investments in more than 80 entrepreneurial teams including Horizon Robotics (US$3B), Tongdun (>$1B), Kujiale (>$1B), Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, Agile Robots, and others. The combined valuation of Linear's portfolio companies is approximately US$15 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier "Data Intelligence Technology Fund," and in the long term, to gradually build itself into the most influential "Frontier Technology Application Fund."