"Whale" Raises Over $60 Million in Series C1 and C2, with Linear Capital Increasing Its Stake | Linear Portfolio

Recently, Singapore-headquartered enterprise AI company Whale announced the completion of its C1 and C2 funding rounds, raising over $60 million in total. Linear Capital led the Pre-A round as the sole investor and has continued to back Whale in multiple subsequent rounds.

In the May 2025 C2 round, Whale brought in new strategic investors including Bosch Ventures, MTR Lab, MDI Ventures (Telkom Indonesia), Singtel Innov8, and SM Prime (Gentree Fund), the largest retail group in the Philippines. The earlier C1 round was co-invested by Temasek Holdings and Linear Capital.

These strategic investors bring more than capital — they are industry leaders in mobility, telecommunications, infrastructure, and deep tech. Take C2 co-leads Bosch Ventures and MTR Lab: beyond their investment, they are actively helping Whale connect with potential industrial collaboration opportunities. Through this round, strategic partners including co-investors will jointly advance Whale's footprint in key sectors such as automotive, fashion retail, FMCG, and chain restaurants. Whale will explore strategic collaboration directions with its investors, accelerate product deployment, co-build enterprise AI solutions, and focus on expansion into China, Southeast Asia, North America, and the global market for innovative enterprise solutions.

As a global AI company, Whale focuses on building enterprise-grade AI-native product solutions that help businesses achieve AI-driven automated operations, decision analytics, and customer insights. Its platform integrates advanced AI, IoT, and data infrastructure technologies to provide a secure, scalable foundation for intelligent business transformation.

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Products and Services Power 600+ Diverse Industry Clients Worldwide

Founded in December 2017 with its China headquarters in Hangzhou and global headquarters in Singapore, Whale has served over 600 clients across 20+ countries. Through technology and solutions, it helps enterprises achieve AI-driven automated business operations, decision analytics, and customer insights. Its product suite spans spatial analytics, voice intelligence, content production, and AI agents, helping businesses automate complex workflows and convert real-time data into action. Its AI solutions cover diverse industries including smart mobility, food and beverage, coffee and tea, home furnishings, maternity and baby products, footwear and apparel, luxury goods, consumer electronics, general retail, healthcare, and finance.

Whale provides an enterprise-grade AI-native product suite that empowers intelligent commercial operations across physical and digital environments, helping clients achieve AI-driven "See, Hear, Express and Think":

• Spatial Intelligence: Provides enterprises with AI video analytics and spatial management capabilities, helping businesses "see" and understand foot traffic data, in-store activities, and operational efficiency. Currently deployed across over 300,000 stores, helping brands monitor millions of video streams daily and execute hundreds of millions of inspection tasks annually.

• Voice Intelligence (HuiSheng): Provides enterprises with audio transcription and AI analytics capabilities, helping businesses "hear" operational conversations through audio parsing and semantic analysis. Processes over 40 million minutes of voice data daily, enabling service quality inspection, store interaction analysis, and training optimization.

• Content Marketing Hub: Helps businesses "express" through AI content creation, structured resource management, and cross-channel automated distribution, generating over 800 million daily content impressions for enterprises, covering digital signage, social media, and localized marketing channels.

• YuMo: An enterprise AI agent suite powered by large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs), providing knowledge management, intelligent search, and task orchestration capabilities. It "thinks" based on models, used by modern businesses to manage millions of unstructured data points, processing over 7 million AI requests daily. Supports building personalized enterprise knowledge bases, spatial management, content moderation, compliance, and customer service agents.

Whale has built 60+ privatized AI models optimized for enterprise scenarios and will continue to invest in generative AI, IoT infrastructure, and data operations.

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Accelerating to Become a Global Leader in Enterprise AI Infrastructure

This funding round marks Whale's acceleration toward becoming a leader in enterprise AI infrastructure across Asia, North America, and global markets. Proceeds will be used to accelerate market expansion, deepen product innovation, and scale global operations to meet growing demand for intelligent commercial systems. Key priorities include:**

• Product Enhancement: Continued development of modular, high-performance, easily integrated AI-native suites (Spatial Intelligence / Voice Intelligence / Content Marketing Hub / YuMo)

• Global Expansion: Strengthened presence in China, Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe, providing localized capabilities for multinational and regional brands

• Talent and R&D: Expansion of top-tier engineering and AI algorithm teams, maintaining leadership in spatial computing, voice intelligence, and generative AI

• Customer Success: Deepened engagement in retail, food and beverage, healthcare, consumer electronics, and automotive industries, delivering measurable solutions

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Assembling Global Talent

Deepening Technology Innovation and Scalable Solutions

The Whale team brings together global talent in hardware engineering, embedded systems, computer vision, data science, and enterprise product development. The founding team has deep expertise in AI, machine learning, and large-scale infrastructure. R&D personnel account for nearly 70% of the team, focused on technology innovation and scalable enterprise AI solutions.

Whale Core Team

Whale founder and CEO Jerry Ye holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Zhejiang University, an M.S. in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech, and a B.S. in Computer Science, Economics, and Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia. He previously served as a data scientist at Meta, leading the design and optimization of large-scale machine learning infrastructure. He deeply integrates AI systems, data engineering, and enterprise business insights into product innovation and long-term strategy.

CTO Shukun Xie holds a computer science degree from Illinois Institute of Technology and previously served as a tech lead at Meta's feed ranking infrastructure and machine learning division, with extensive experience in distributed model training, real-time inference systems, and large-scale recommendation algorithms. He leads the architecture design of Whale's enterprise-grade native AI platform, ensuring performance stability, security, reliability, and enterprise scalability.

Regarding this funding round, Whale founder and CEO Jerry Ye stated: "This is a milestone in Whale's journey toward our vision of 'becoming the trusted AI technology partner for modern commerce worldwide.' We will continue to push the boundaries of enterprise AI — deeply integrating advanced technology with real business impact."

Donald Wihardja, CEO of MDI Ventures, said: "We are delighted to be an investor in Whale and support its growth journey. As enterprise AI continues to evolve, we see growing demand for enterprise solutions in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, and Whale's solutions effectively address core pain points that these enterprises have long needed to solve. Therefore, we not only look forward to Whale's continued growth but also hope to leverage Telkom's commercial resources to help Indonesian enterprises fully achieve AI transformation."

An MTR Lab representative stated: "Whale is MTR Lab's first AI-driven retail technology investment, aligning with MTR Lab's investment focus on new retail innovation. MTR Lab has consistently focused on smart cities and sustainable development as its strategic themes, with key investment areas covering new retail technology, smart mobility, and proptech. Through investing in Whale and retail technology, MTR Lab aims to support cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence to drive further digital transformation in the retail industry, providing more optimized online-offline integrated customer experiences for the industry, thereby realizing its smart city vision."

About Linear Capital

Linear Capital is an early-stage investment firm focused on the "frontier technology + industry" direction — that is, frontier technologies represented by data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics, and new technological transformations in traditional fields (such as biomedicine, materials, energy, etc.), applied across vertical industries to significantly improve industrial efficiency, empower solutions to pain points, and complete industrial upgrading. Through substantial enhancement of industrial value, it achieves excess returns in commercial value. It currently manages ten funds with total AUM of approximately $2 billion.

Its investment stage focuses on leading angel to Series A rounds, with individual investment amounts ranging from $1 million to $10 million (or RMB equivalent).

To date, it has made early-stage investments in over 140 startup teams including Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, Agile Robots, and EHang Holdings Limited. The combined valuation of Linear Capital's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

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