Six emerging companies in Hangzhou are lining up for IPO.
Unitree Robotics, Coohom, BrainCo, Game Science, DeepSeek, and CloudMinds Robotics — these six companies emerged into the public eye almost simultaneously a year ago and were hailed by the media as the "Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou." They dominated the tech news landscape and became the talk of the town.
So, how are these six Hangzhou tech companies faring now?
The answer is that they are lining up for IPOs. Four of the six companies are either on the verge of going public or in the process of preparing for it, namely Unitree, Coohom, CloudMinds, and BrainCo.
However, this has also been a year filled with intense challenges. The huge "glory moments" have brought about global encirclement and fierce competition within the industry.
It can be said that they are in a fascinating yet perilous moment.
This article delves into what they have actually accomplished this year, how they have deepened their businesses, and what pressures they have endured.
Let's take a closer look at the year 2025 of the Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou.
01
Capital Landscape: Who's Ringing the Bell? Who's "Counting the Money"?
The Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou can currently be divided into two categories. One group is standing at the door of the stock exchange, while the other group is flush with cash on paper.
Let's start with the first category. The first - tier four companies are all gearing up for IPOs.
Originally, Unitree was leading the pack and was just one step away from going public.
However, today (January 13, 2026), BrainCo was reported to have submitted a confidential IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Therefore, BrainCo is expected to be the first company among the "Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou" to go public.
On January 6th of this year, BrainCo completed a financing round of approximately 2 billion RMB, making it the second - largest financing in the brain - computer interface field after Neuralink under Elon Musk.
Although BrainCo had not turned a profit by the end of 2024, why are investors willing to pour money into it?
In the brain - computer interface field, which has long been dominated by Elon Musk and Neuralink, BrainCo is the only "top player" from China that can sit at the same table.
This company, founded in 2015 by Han Bicheng, a Harvard alumnus, has its own technological approach — non - invasive. It establishes a series of "digital nerves" between the brain and external devices. More importantly, it has already launched several products directly onto the market, covering areas from disability rehabilitation to autism intervention.
Due to its safer and more scalable approach, combined with the clear and strong - willed demand in the market, the market, although niche, has strong payment capabilities.
As for Unitree Robotics, its guidance status was marked as "guidance acceptance" in November 2025, indicating that its listing is just around the corner.
At the 2025 Summer Davos Forum, Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree Robotics, revealed that Unitree's annual revenue has exceeded 1 billion RMB, with the total annual order value approaching 1.2 billion RMB and the shipment volume exceeding 10,000 units. An even more positive sign is that the company has been profitable for five consecutive years.
Through continuous R & D and innovation, focusing on both the B2B and B2C markets, it has achieved large - scale revenue from high - tech products.
The key factor is that its products are affordable. In physical stores, the Go2 Air and Go2 Pro robotic dogs from Unitree are priced at 10,497 RMB and 19,999 RMB respectively. You can take home these cyber dogs for just ten or twenty thousand yuan.
The two humanoid robots, originally priced from 99,000 RMB, are available at a discounted price of 85,000 RMB. For less than 100,000 yuan, you can own these "cyber stars."
Similarly, CloudMinds Robotics, which has been deeply involved in the quadruped robot field, has also witnessed explosive growth in this booming market. Its revenue doubled in 2024, and the expected robot shipment volume in 2025 will reach the 10,000 - unit level. The company raised a total of over 1 billion RMB in three financing rounds last year.
At the beginning of 2026, CloudMinds also initiated the listing guidance process. After eight rounds of financing, it has become the third company among the "Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou" to aim for an IPO, following Coohom and Unitree Robotics.
Coohom is also on the verge of going public.
In 2024, it held a 23.2% share of the domestic spatial design software market, ranking first and covering more than 200 countries and regions.
Coohom focuses on "spatial intelligence" + a "cloud - native 3D design platform," providing services that home furnishing companies are willing to pay for and generating stable and predictable recurring revenue. Moreover, with the advent of AI, the company has successfully transformed into a spatial model provider and claims to be the "world's first stock in spatial intelligence."
The second - tier companies, DeepSeek and Game Science, are the most interesting and also the ones with the most abundant funds.
Game Science became famous overnight and is almost like a "money - printing machine." The single - product sales volume exceeded 9 billion RMB, and it has a huge cash flow.
Recall the spectacular launch of "Black Myth: Wukong." On the day of its release, 4.5 million copies were sold, with each standard - edition copy priced at 268 RMB. Data shows that the game's sales reached 9 billion RMB in just four months. In addition, various derivative products, such as limited - edition figurines, sold out quickly as soon as they were launched.
Game Science achieved a huge positive cash flow in a very short period, proving that high - quality content itself can be a highly profitable business.
In 2025, Game Science began to vigorously promote the commercialization of IP derivatives.
Game Science's ambition extends beyond the game screen. In January 2025, an independent derivative brand, "BLACKMYTH," was quietly launched, extending the aesthetics of Black Myth to clothing and trendy toys. Then, in September, its first offline flagship store in Hangzhou opened. This move indicates that Game Science wants to sell a lifestyle and make more money from its fans.
As for DeepSeek, there is no doubt that it remains the "hope of the whole village."
Financially, DeepSeek's parent company, Magic Square Quantitative, earned 5 billion RMB last year, so it is definitely not short of money.
On March 1, 2025, DeepSeek released a financial report that shocked the entire industry. The theoretical daily profit of its V3/R1 inference system was as high as 3.46 million RMB (475,000 US dollars), with a cost - profit ratio of 545%. Although the company later explained that the actual profit was far less than this figure, these numbers still left a lot of room for imagination in the market.
More importantly, it shattered the misconception that open - source means burning money. DeepSeek not only leads in technology but also has a profit margin through extreme cost control.
In 2025, the valuation of DeepSeek and the net worth of its founder, Liang Wenfeng, became topics of great interest. Some foreign media once predicted that DeepSeek's valuation could reach as high as 150 billion US dollars, and the net worth of Liang Wenfeng might even surpass that of Huang Renxun at that time.
In the capital game in 2025, the biggest mystery lies with Liang Wenfeng. Will we get an answer to this wealth question in 2026? Let's wait and see.
After looking at the capital side and financial performance, let's delve deeper into the questions: How did they make money? And why can only they make this kind of money?
02
New Product Review: What Have They Deepened This Year?
Game Science
At the wee hours of August 20, 2025, Game Science made a grand finale appearance at the Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, unveiling its new game, "Black Myth: Zhong Kui." This was the first time a Chinese game had taken the "prime position" on the world stage. Moreover, the 2 - minute trailer of "Black Myth: Zhong Kui" received over 14 million views on Bilibili.
Foreign players were also extremely excited. In the comment section of the trailer, many players were using English to explain who Zhong Kui was. They never thought that Chinese games could reach such a level. Overseas comments were in awe of the dark - mythical texture of Zhong Kui's image (black face, red robe, riding a tiger) shown in the trailer, demonstrating their obsession with this aesthetic.
From this new game, we can see Game Science's "ambition." It doesn't just want to focus on the Journey to the West series but aims to build a broader and more extensive "Black Myth" universe based on ancient Chinese mythology and folk legends. There is a vast potential for game - making in this field, and the gameplay can be more diverse.
More importantly, Feng Ji, the founder, resisted the temptation of taking a shortcut. He said, "DLCs are not bad, but we prefer to create a brand - new Black Myth game from scratch." This means a new universe, new gameplay, new aesthetics, and a new technological approach.
During the years of developing "Wukong," Game Science painstakingly built an industrial pipeline. The most well - known achievements include quickly converting 3D scans of cultural relics into game assets, as well as breakthroughs in external hair rendering and detailed combat animations.
This set of capabilities is their real moat. It means that it might take them 5 - 6 years to develop their first game, but the efficiency of developing the second and third games could increase exponentially.
DeepSeek
At the beginning of the year, R1 became a huge hit, and DeepSeek was once called "China's OpenAI." However, the hype later subsided. In 2025, DeepSeek released models nine times. Although the highly anticipated R2 has not yet arrived, it has been continuously pursuing model innovation.
Notably, in October, it launched a new model called DeepSeek - OCR, which features the "Context Optical Compression" technology.
To put it simply, this black - tech means that the large - language model "sees" the text instead of "reading" it.
A 1000 - word article can be compressed into 100 visual tokens. This directly addresses the biggest pain point of large - language models: the inefficiency in handling long contexts. This is still a "first in the industry."
On December 1, 2025, DeepSeek released two official models: DeepSeek - V3.2 and DeepSeek - V3.2 - Speciale, targeting daily applications and extreme inference scenarios respectively. This time, the new model outperformed OpenAI and even caught up with Gemini 3. The new trick is DSA (DeepSeek Sparse Attention) — sparse attention.
This is still the innovative DeepSeek, figuring out how to generate more intelligence with limited data and computing power.
In 2025, during the DeepSeek open - source week, six core technologies were released, covering core areas such as AI training, inference, storage, parallel computing, and communication optimization, aiming to solve the efficiency and cost bottlenecks in the era of large - language models.
In the eyes of the outside world, DeepSeek is a "terrible cost - killer," driving down the training and inference costs of large - language models to rock - bottom levels.
For DeepSeek, having money is not the barrier; saving money is. If competitors follow suit, they will surely lose in the short term in terms of cost - saving. If they don't, their competitiveness will decline. This dilemma for competitors is DeepSeek's deepest moat.
Because it has adhered to the most difficult and least - known underlying technological path without much financial support or backing from large companies.
Coohom
Coohom is the most underestimated among the Six Little Dragons. Many people think Coohom is just "CoolHome." Actually, it aims to be the DeepSeek in the spatial field.
During the 2025 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, Huang Xiaohuang, the co - founder and chairman of Coohom, said, "Similar to DeepSeek, we are more about 'intelligence.' We focus more on understanding and reasoning about space, while DeepSeek focuses more on understanding and reasoning about human language."
There are two "DeepSeeks" in one field, and Hangzhou has half of them.
In the past year, Coohom has accomplished two remarkable things:
First, it released models. It launched the Spatial Language Model SpatialLM1.5 and the Spatial Generation Model SpatialGen, which can directly generate interactive 3D indoor spatial designs based on text instructions. Second, it adhered to open - source, and its models once ranked among the top three on the HuggingFace model trending list.
This spatial model makes it possible for machines to "enter" the digital physical world. For machines to understand space, they need to understand spatial relationships, object attributes, and physical parameters and be able to output these data in a structured manner. This requires both model capabilities and structured data.
Fei - Fei Li, known as the "Godmother of AI," believes that the future belongs to the era of spatial intelligence. Coohom's transformation has been quite remarkable.
Why is it the most surprising?
In 2025, a new consensus emerged in the AI industry: The text data on the Internet has almost been exhausted, and the training of large - language models has reached a bottleneck. Even the scaling law has been put aside in the industry.
The fuel for the next - stage evolution of AI is data from the physical world.
Founded in 2011, Coohom spent the first few years quietly developing 3D rendering tools in the home furnishing industry. It now holds 441 million 3D models and 500 million structured spatial scenarios.
Today, when global giants are all shouting about "spatial intelligence" and trying to make robots understand the 3D world, they find a severe shortage of high - quality synthetic data. At this time, the data that Coohom has accumulated over 13 years has suddenly become a goldmine.
Where did these data come from? They are the result of years of accumulation, which is its unshakable moat.
Unitree Robotics
Throughout 2025, Unitree won industry - level orders on one hand and dominated the consumer market on the other, making a splash in various scenarios.
On December 31, 2025, Unitree's first global store officially opened in Beijing, showcasing a variety of star products such as the Unitree Go2 quadruped robot dog and the G1 humanoid robot. On December 18, six G1 humanoid robots from Unitree made their debut on stage at Wang Leehom's concert in Chengdu, dancing to the song "Full Throttle."
In 2025, Unitree released a new - generation humanoid robot, the Unitree H2, which introduced the "human face element" for the first time. In the video, the over 1.8 - meter - tall H2 performed a flying kick and a side - kick in the air, scaring Wang Xingxing.
In the quadruped robot field, Unitree has truly achieved global leadership. In terms of shipment volume, market share, cost - performance ratio, R & D