Linear Capital's 11th Anniversary: A Frontier Tech Fund's Retrospective and Future Journey

On September 15, 2014, Linear Capital was officially founded in Shanghai. Today, we have walked alongside our partners through eleven full cycles of seasons, continually striving toward our goal of "becoming the best frontier technology fund."

On this memorable occasion, Harry Wang, founder and CEO of Linear Capital, has written this letter — both a retrospective and tribute to the past eleven years, and a pledge and vision for the decade ahead.

The purity rooted in engineering is where all our stories begin. The entrepreneurs we've watched grow are the fuel for our confidence. And our core investment philosophy is to see these technical founders as ourselves, working alongside them to realize the vision of "bringing the innovations of frontier technology to everyone."

Today marks Linear Capital's eleventh anniversary.

Eleven years is but a fleeting moment in the grand sweep of history. Yet for an early-stage technology venture fund, it is long enough to witness the rise and fall of several generations of technological waves, and long enough to accompany a cohort of founders from obscurity to industry leadership.

Looking back across these four-thousand-plus days, we often ask ourselves: Where did we come from? What have we held onto? And where are we headed? This piece is both a retrospective and tribute to the past eleven years, and a pledge and vision for the decade ahead.

My story began with "code." As an engineer who once wrote countless lines of code at Facebook, I believed in my bones in the power of using technology to solve hard problems. I joined when it was a hundred-person startup and left when it had grown into a five-thousand-person Silicon Valley star. That experience at Facebook gave me my first financial freedom.

After returning to China, I naturally spent two years as an individual angel investor — more an extension of interest than anything. I was supporting young people who, like the person I once was, harbored dreams built on technology.

The real "level-up" came through a twist of fate and the help of mentors that landed me in early-stage technology investing — a more professional and challenging arena.

At first, we didn't limit ourselves to "technology." We also tried a few business-model-driven startups. But after paying plenty of "tuition," we quickly realized that what this group of people was best at, and what resonated with us most deeply, was always tightly bound to technology and the community of engineers.

What are our strengths? First, we understand technology and can grasp the underlying logic of building the future. Second, our team possesses nearly limitless curiosity and empathy — we can genuinely feel the passion and struggle of technical founders, and share in the excitement of the ambitious goals they want to fight for.

This gradually clarified Linear's positioning: we are not merely investors, but fellow travelers with entrepreneurs. Our core investment philosophy is actually quite simple — "see them as ourselves." We want ourselves to succeed, so we want them to succeed just as much. This purity rooted in engineering became the starting point for all our stories in the eleven years that followed.

Investing is, at its core, about investing in people. For the past 11 years, we have been searching for a certain kind of person — I call them "fanatics." They "Think Big, Move Solid." They have the ambition to reach for the stars, the tenacity to keep their feet on the ground, and the unkillable spirit of a cockroach. We have been fortunate to meet, get to know, and fight alongside some of the best among them. The stories of the three founders below are a microcosm of our journey with these successful, fanatical technology entrepreneurs.

Meeting Kai Yu of Horizon Robotics: A Resonance of Unwavering Conviction

When I first met Kai Yu in 2013, he was still heading Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning. We hit it off immediately. I saw in him a solid engineer who, like me, held a near-religious faith in technology — and more than that, I saw the tremendous courage to make the impossible possible. We spent two years in continuous exchange and debate, ultimately persuading him to leave Baidu and venture into the uncharted territory of compute chips.

In September 2015, we used our very first fund as entrepreneurs to participate in his angel round. Looking back, what drew me in was precisely that quality of "choosing the harder path" — he had selected a difficult road that would push his potential to its absolute limits.

Meeting Xiaohuang Huang of Manycore Tech: A Conviction in Pure Earnestness

I met Xiaohuang Huang through volunteering at a Zhejiang University alumni event. His smarts and pure engineer's earnestness left a deep impression on me. When he returned to China to start a company and came to me, I was moved once again by this purity. For young first-time founders, we don't expect them to be particularly "sophisticated." What we value more is their purity and capacity to learn. We firmly believe that a pure founder, as long as they can do two things — learn and grow rapidly through repeated mistakes, without making fatal errors of recklessness — will inevitably transform from raw jade into a seasoned entrepreneur.

Manycore Tech (Kujiale) became over ten years the largest player in interior design rendering and the foremost aggregator of spatial data, ranking among this year's much-discussed "Hangzhou Six Little Dragons." It has also secured a leading position in the critical spatial intelligence track, partnering with top embodied intelligence companies at home and abroad to open a second growth curve. Their success perfectly validates this belief.

Investing in Agile Robots: A Decisive Act Driven by Pure Curiosity

We were initially drawn deeply to Zhaopeng Chen's team and their leading force-controlled robotics technology. Pure curiosity about new technology drove us to become the first, and only, investment institution to fly to Munich, Germany within a month of making contact to personally "tinker with" their lab prototype.

We knew well that judgment on technology, product, and future commercialization tolerates no hesitation — execution must be absolutely strong. It was this decisiveness that allowed us to lead the angel round of this company, which started from Germany and has now become a global leader in intelligent robotics. This company also stands as the most likely to be the first portfolio company to return more than our entire fund size.

Behind these stories, our portrait of the ideal founder has grown ever clearer: They typically come without particularly privileged social backgrounds, but are smart and energetic. More importantly, they are ambitious and hold upward values. They possess powerful learning ability and resilient willpower — they can "grind," they can "die hard" in adversity. They are magnetic poles of shared ideals, attracting the most top-tier, get-things-done, no-complaining talent to gather around them.

We know well that capital is merely the most basic form of support for founders. In Linear's value system, "post-investment service" is not a department, but a responsibility woven into our blood. Over the past eleven years, we have found that the most valuable help we can offer portfolio companies comes down to three things:

• The most efficient "free FA": We unreservedly bring to bear Linear's accumulated reputation and network in technology investing to help them connect with and persuade excellent follow-on investors, completing round after round of critical financing. All of this, completely free.
• The most sincere "decision-making external brain": We typically lead with a substantial stake and take board seats — not for control, but because we "care." It is so that at critical decision points, we can offer our heartfelt advice without "adding chaos or overstepping." We strive to broaden the width and depth of founders' thinking, with only one precondition: our interests are thoroughly aligned with the company's long-term interests.
• The most solid "emotional value": Entrepreneurship is a lonely and arduous road. We are willing to pick up the phone in the deep of night when a founder calls, confused or discouraged. We are willing, when they are at their hardest, to bring a bottle of wine, sit down, listen earnestly, and figure things out together. We hope to become an emotional anchor they can trust, a solid backstop they can always reach.

Of course, we must also acknowledge the importance of "luck." Linear has been a fortunate institution, but behind this lies our consistent practice of "Always think one step further." Only by thinking one step further than others, by anticipating ahead of time, can we possibly keep bad luck at greater distance and keep good luck company with us and our portfolio companies.

Eleven years of exploration has not been smooth sailing. We too have fallen into quagmires and paid expensive costs.

• One of the greatest challenges was in SaaS (enterprise services). From a macro perspective, our investments in this track were almost a "total wipeout." This was a massive "quagmire" — countless talented people and enormous capital poured into it, yet due to the underlying logic and market environment of the entire industry, yielded little after a decade of struggle.
• Another enormous challenge was the pandemic and its aftermath. This significantly delayed the appreciation, commercialization, and IPO plans of many excellent projects, bringing unprecedented difficulties to all.
• The greatest challenge of all, however, came from our own pace of growth. We deeply recognize that we invest in Tech Business, not merely Technology itself — a lesson that cost us considerable tuition. From technology to product, from product to commercial goods, and then to scaled business — each step is a chasm to cross. The challenges at each stage differ, requiring founding teams and ourselves to learn and grow with maximum efficiency.

These setbacks have made us more reverent toward the market, and more prudent and clear-eyed as we face the future.

If the past decade was the era of "weak AI," then the coming decade will be the era of "strong AI." The stunning performance of DeepSeek's reasoning model earlier this year reignited confidence across China's technology community. Linear Capital's core strategy for the next three to five years, and indeed the entire decade, will center on "strong AI." We are focused on three major directions:

• AI + software/applications: Large model capabilities have matured enough to become the new "infrastructure" — just as the explosion of applications only came after the internet was built. We firmly believe that all consumer and enterprise applications will be reshaped by strong AI. This is a trillion-dollar-level massive market; the difficulty lies in finding the precise entry point.
• AI + hardware/robotics: This splits into two categories. One is consumer electronics — combining China's powerful supply chain, its talent advantage in hardware-software integration, and large model capabilities, AI glasses, personal companion robots, and other embodied personal hardware will emerge in endless variety. The other is embodied AI (Embodied AI), which will gradually replace human roles in industrial, logistics, and even home scenarios, sparking a revolution in productivity.
• AI + science (AI4S): This will be AI's most disruptive domain. Scientific breakthroughs will no longer rely solely on the flashes of insight from a handful of genius scientists. AI can fuse all of humanity's knowledge, accelerating theoretical discovery by a hundredfold or thousandfold. AI-driven automated experimental equipment can accelerate validation with equally astonishing efficiency. From drug discovery and protein engineering to new materials and new energy, AI4S will change the world from its very source.

In this future environment that will be more dynamic and filled with greater uncertainty, our expectations for the "fanatics" we seek have gained a few additional dimensions:

• Firm belief in AI: The courage to make heavy bets and long-term commitments between AI's enormous potential and its remaining imperfections, especially in accumulating proprietary vertical data to build true moats.
• Extreme "fanaticism": This fanaticism manifests both in the unwavering will of "when narrow paths meet, the brave prevail," and in the practical execution of confronting "tough reality" head-on.
• "If you're not crazy, we don't invest; if we invest, we go crazy together": We are not looking for mercenaries, but "comrades-in-arms." We want to fight alongside fanatical "madmen" who understand science and technology, building deep trust in "us."

At root, Linear's decision model is "Data-driven Emotional Decision" — we rely on past experience and data analysis for rational judgment, but what ultimately pulls the trigger is the passion (Passion) grounded in substance, the deep resonance with the trinity of entrepreneurial spirit: "Think Big, Move Small, Die Hard."

Behind all of this lies the goal we set at our founding: to become the best Frontier Tech Fund. Our mission is to find like-minded partners to jointly realize the vision of "Frontier Tech, Frontier Productivity, Frontier Lifestyle — All for a Better Society." We firmly believe that these innovations in frontier technology will benefit everyone, in China and across the world.

This is our mission for the next decade. We look forward to finding the next era's Kai Yu, Xiaohuang Huang, and Zhaopeng Chen in the vast expanse of strong AI, and together with them, creating truly disruptive innovation and writing the next magnificent decade.

Finally, our team continues to grow. We welcome young people eager to devote themselves to early-stage technology investing, especially those with tremendous passion for strong AI applications, to reach out to us.

The future is already here. We are ready.

Harry Wang Founder and CEO, Linear Capital