Heart Capital AI Portfolio Company Shanji Technology Raises Tens of Millions of Yuan in Series A Funding, to Launch China's First Mass-Produced AI Camera Glasses | HeartStar PORTFOLIO

On November 20, Shanji Technology, a global pioneer in the smart hardware industry, announced the completion of a Series A financing round worth tens of millions of RMB. The round was led by Forebright Capital, with participation from Future Light Cone Frontier Technology Fund and CloudWalk Technology, a listed leader in edge AI. Yuewei Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. The proceeds will be primarily used for market expansion, AI technology R&D, and talent development for the company's strategic new product — Shanji AI camera glasses — to ensure Shanji's continued leadership in the emerging AI hardware赛道.

Heart Capital invested in Shanji Technology's Pre-A round in 2021, making it the company's first institutional investor. On this latest round, Heart Capital partner Jing Zhao said, "As Shanji's first institutional shareholder, we are delighted to have accompanied and witnessed the team's rapid growth. Over the past three years, the company has exceeded revenue expectations every year, and its products have been deeply loved by users. This year, the company ventured into the more challenging stage of AI hardware, achieving excellence and innovation across hardware, supply chain, software, and AI algorithms. We believe Shanji will become an industry-leading brand, continuing to deliver surprises to users and the industry."

The Heart Capital team continues to focus on globalization opportunities brought by artificial intelligence and digitalization, maintaining active deployment. In early 2023, when large AI models were still in their infancy, the team invested in Series A in Baichuan, a domestic AI large model unicorn, and in angel round in Lynksoul, an AI entertainment assistant. Earlier, the team had invested in Series A in MetaX, a high-performance GPU chip company; in Series A in Lanhu, an AI-driven product design collaboration platform; and in Pre-A round in Shanji Technology, the AI hardware industry pioneer receiving funding in this round. These investments cover the complete AI investment ecosystem spanning infrastructure, model layer, and application layer.

With the advancement of key AI technologies, particularly the rapid progress of large models, the product-market fit for AI camera glasses is being illuminated at an accelerating pace, with the potential to become the core carrier of next-generation human-computer interaction. Shanji Technology founder and CEO Bo Zhang stated, "This financing will inject strong momentum into the R&D, promotion, and sales of Shanji's AI camera glasses new product, helping us seize the precious time window. At the same time, based on Shanji's experience and advantages in hardware product design, technological innovation, and channel marketing, we will strive to convert our first-mover advantage in the AI camera glasses market into scaled shipment advantages, making it an industry benchmark."

Founded in 2020, Shanji Technology is a hardware technology company built on technological innovation, product aesthetics, and premium quality as its core competitive strengths. The company's core team comes from leading mobile phone and drone brands, with an integrated global online and offline marketing network. It enjoys exceptionally high brand recognition and reputation in the global tech hardware space, particularly in premium charging, energy storage, and photography accessories.

After four years of development, Shanji's products are now distributed globally, having successfully entered Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, Japan, and other countries and regions, accumulating over one million high-spending-power core users worldwide. Beyond this, Shanji has continued to strengthen its brand crossover and IP operations in recent years, establishing deep partnerships with well-known automotive and mobile phone brands such as NIO and OnePlus, and securing exclusive IP cooperation for The Wandering Earth II, further driving its brand beyond its original circle.

In preparation for the launch of this strategic new product, AI camera glasses, Shanji has been notably active throughout this year. On the channel front, it established deep cooperation with LOHO, a thousand-store eyewear brand, leveraging the latter's coverage across all eyewear categories, customer segments, and scenarios to precisely meet consumer demand and support terminal channel deployment for Shanji AI camera glasses. On the AI investment front, it brought on Xin Pan, formerly the first research software engineer at Google Brain, former head of ByteDance's AI platform, and co-founder of a leading AI large model company, as a partner to comprehensively lead AI-related technology R&D. On the AI ecosystem capability building front, it formed deep, all-around partnerships with iFlytek, a leader in voice AI, and CloudWalk Technology, a domestic leader in edge AI, to build out multimodal AI capabilities. Going forward, Shanji will continue increasing investment in multimodal large models and application ecosystem layers, constructing core barriers centered on user experience.

At present, with more and more players entering the market, the AI glasses market is on the verge of comprehensive explosion. As one of the earliest domestic teams to enter this space, Shanji — after nearly a year of careful refinement — has reason to expect that its new product will deliver surprises to the industry and users in terms of performance parameters, functional experience, and AI capabilities. The strong injection of capital from this round will further help Shanji AI camera glasses rapidly open up market positioning, assisting its growth into an industry and user "new favorite."

Founded in 2022, Heart Capital is a China-based early-stage venture capital fund focused on technology and digitalization. The Heart Capital team is primarily composed of Yan Han, founding partner of Lightspeed China, core investors, a chief financial officer, and seasoned investors from industry backgrounds. The team's past investments include Series A investments in Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV, 09868.HK), Full Truck Alliance (NYSE: YMM), as well as FinVolution Group (NYSE: FINV), RoboSense (02498.HK), Baichuan, Yunmanman Cold Chain, Fan Deng Reading, World Logistics, Micro-nano Starry Sky, LandSpace, Lanhu, Starfield, and others. Rooted in China with a global perspective, Heart Capital is committed to finding true value in non-consensus. Heart Capital respects the value of "people" and advocates the potential of "heart," looking forward to accompanying more young Chinese entrepreneurs to strengthen China and go global.