Recently, Qiming Venture Partners achieved five AI IPOs.

After a long absence, the primary market has welcomed an IPO harvest season.

In the past year, attending the IPO ringing ceremonies of invested companies has become an important itinerary for many investors. Among them, Qiming Venture Partners' achievements are impressive - it has achieved 8 IPOs in the past 12 months, including Hyperstrong, Insta360, Unisound, Yunji Technology, Insilico Medicine, Biren Technology, and Zhipu. Upon closer inspection, as many as 5 of them are pure artificial intelligence companies, which is quite rare in the primary market.

As one of the most active funds investing in artificial intelligence in China, Qiming Venture Partners started to layout in AI in 2013. Over the past decade, it has quietly completed the entire cycle from early - stage seeding to the first - round of large - scale harvest. This is not only a bumper harvest for a leading VC with deep accumulation but also a reference sample for venture capital institutions to deeply participate in and promote the development of China's AI industry.

As Kuang Ziping, the founding managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, has always firmly believed, artificial intelligence will bring huge benefits and contains the most certain investment opportunities in the next two decades.

Heavily invested in AI 13 years ago

IPO harvest season

This round of concentrated harvest by Qiming Venture Partners clearly points to one direction - artificial intelligence.

In the past twelve months, Qiming Venture Partners has successively achieved 5 listed companies in the pure AI field, outlining a vivid industrial context: from Unisound, one of the pioneers of China's AGI technology industrialization, to Yunji Technology, the "first stock of robot service intelligent agents", and then to Insilico Medicine, the "first AI - pharmaceutical stock in the Hong Kong stock market"; from Biren Technology, the "first GPU stock in the Hong Kong stock market", to Zhipu, the "first large - model stock in the world", all shining brightly.

When Biren Technology went public, its market value once exceeded HK$100 billion, and then Zhipu also reached a market value of over HK$100 billion. This means that Qiming Venture Partners achieved two IPOs with a market value of over HK$100 billion within 6 days, creating a rare scene in the AI wave.

Among them, the story of Biren Technology is particularly prominent. Zhou Zhifeng, the managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, and Zhang Wen, the founder of Biren Technology, are both alumni of Columbia University, and they have known each other in the AI venture capital circle for a long time. At the beginning of Biren Technology's establishment in 2019, Qiming Venture Partners, as the founding investor, led the company's first - round financing and continued to invest in subsequent rounds.

For Zhou Zhifeng, this marked the first time in his career that he made an investment decision "before the company was established". "Most investments occur in the stage of a company from 0 to 1, while this time it was at - 0.1."

Since then, from being the founding investor to the cornerstone investor in the IPO, from assisting in "finding people, finding money, and finding directions" in the early stage to playing the role of the "co - pilot" in the long - term, Qiming Venture Partners has always been one of the most steadfast partners of Biren Technology - it is both the largest external institutional shareholder and the leading senior independent investor in its Hong Kong stock IPO.

This investment that started from the early days has become a vivid example of Qiming Venture Partners' long - termism in the AI field.

A similar situation also occurred in the investment in Zhipu. Nearly a year before the release of ChatGPT, when almost no one had heard of the term "large model", Qiming Venture Partners co - led the Series B1 financing of Zhipu - it was this capital that supported Zhipu to complete the R & D of its first large - scale model GLM with a parameter scale of over 100 billion. Later, Qiming Venture Partners also continued to invest in Series B2 and B4 and became a senior independent investor in Zhipu's listing under Rule 18C in the Hong Kong stock market.

Qiming Venture Partners has always had a judgment - "The explosive growth of artificial intelligence applications is expected." Based on this, they captured Insilico Medicine in the field of AI + new drug R & D. As early as 2019, four years before OpenAI became popular, Chen Kan, a partner of Qiming Venture Partners and the co - head of the medical innovation industry, led a team to invest in Insilico Medicine based on the belief that "AI will profoundly change the path and efficiency of drug R & D". After seven years of companionship and multiple rounds of investment, they finally witnessed the largest Biotech IPO in the Hong Kong stock market in 2025.

Kuang Ziping has mentioned more than once that for AI to be implemented in the physical world, autonomous driving is one of the key application scenarios. In this forward - looking track, Qiming Venture Partners has made a layout with a stronger industrial chain thinking. Many people may not know that when WeRide was established in 2017, Qiming Venture Partners was the only institutional investor to co - invest with the founder. Later, it also continued to participate in multiple rounds of financing, including two rounds of convertible bonds in the early stage and Series A and B financing.

When WeRide faced financial difficulties in the early stage, Qiming Venture Partners quickly made a decision to invest alone, which was like "providing timely help". It accompanied WeRide from its startup stage to its listing on the NASDAQ and then to its dual primary listing in the Hong Kong stock market in 2025.

Qiming Venture Partners' continuous harvest in the AI field is based on its long - term in - depth cultivation and forward - looking layout of the technological iteration of the AI industry. In 2013, when the wave of deep learning was just emerging, with discriminative technologies such as speech recognition as the core breakthrough point, Unisound, as one of the first domestic enterprises to apply deep - learning algorithms to commercial speech recognition, was at the starting point of technological industrialization. Qiming Venture Partners keenly captured this trend and resolutely participated in Unisound's Series A investment.

In the following more than a decade, Qiming Venture Partners not only continued to invest in subsequent key rounds but also accompanied Unisound through its transformation. It witnessed the company's release of the general large - language model "Shanhai Model" with a parameter scale of 60 billion in 2023. After Unisound was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2025, its stock price once soared to HK$879 per share. This scene is not only a return for the company's technological precipitation but also a strong proof of Qiming Venture Partners' long - term companionship and in - depth participation in the evolution of the AI industry.

Half a step ahead

Invested in an AI map

Through this IPO list, Qiming Venture Partners' investment strategy in the field of artificial intelligence clearly emerges. They have almost covered the entire industrial stack: from the chips that carry computing power, the basic large models that drive innovation, to the robots and vertical - scenario applications that undertake technologies, and then extended to the frontier integration areas such as life sciences. A systematic investment map has taken shape.

In fact, Qiming Venture Partners' systematic layout in the field of artificial intelligence started in 2013. They successively invested in future stars such as Unisound, Megvii, Ubtech, and WeRide.

Before the emergence of GPT - 3 in 2020 and the global explosion of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, their investment portfolio had already targeted key nodes in the AI industrial chain such as Zhipu, Jieyue Xingchen, Shengshu Technology, Wuwen Xinqiong, and Wuxian Guangnian, as well as enterprises in the field of embodied intelligence such as Yinhe Tongyong, Tashi Zhihang, and Sharpa.

The investment community has obtained a set of data - Qiming Venture Partners has invested in more than 100 AI projects in total, with a cumulative investment of about 12 billion yuan. The invested enterprises cover the entire chain of the AI industry, making it one of the most active investment institutions in the field of artificial intelligence in China and even Asia.

After a detailed study of this veteran VC's investment path in AI, their actions have always revolved around the underlying value concept of "AI empowering all industries". An AI investment map that is inter - related and closely linked to the industrialization process has emerged:

Inference optimization and edge deployment (making the model lighter, faster, and cheaper), multimodality and embodied intelligence (the combination of AI and the physical world), AI - driven scientific discovery (applications in fields such as biology and materials), and AI - native applications that can form a commercial closed - loop.

In the aspect of AI - driven scientific discovery, Qiming Venture Partners has widely laid out in the field of AI + medical innovation. So far, it has invested in nearly 30 enterprises and has invested in a series of leading "AI + medical" companies such as Insilico Medicine, Deepwise, Meirui Chemistry, and Benyao Technology, and has been very active. "In the next two decades, the application of artificial intelligence may change many industries and ecosystems. Especially, the penetration of artificial intelligence into the medical field will comprehensively improve the quality and efficiency of medical services," said Hu Xubo, the managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners. The scene he is looking forward to is becoming a reality.

Over the years, the outside world's impression of Qiming Venture Partners' AI investment is mainly that they can always make forward - looking layouts at every key node and finally reap the rewards of time when the industry explodes.

This is exactly the true interpretation of Qiming Venture Partners' unique "half - step - ahead" investment philosophy that Kuang Ziping has always emphasized - the golden window for technology investment often appears when the "technological breakthrough point" has emerged but the "market explosion point" has not yet arrived. It requires precise layout between the two.

This kind of forward - looking prediction of trends and pre - emptive positioning extremely tests the comprehensive ability of an investment institution. It must have industry insights that can penetrate the cycle, the courage to bet on non - consensus views, and the long - term patience to accompany enterprises through the silent period of technology maturity and market verification.

Just like in this round of AI listing wave, Qiming Venture Partners occupies five seats, and most of these investments were made when "no one was interested". This report card is an inevitable echo of an early - stage VC's belief in hard technology and its adherence to long - termism.

The next two decades

The most certain track

Nowadays, from the government, academia, industry to the investment community, there is a unanimous consensus from top to bottom - artificial intelligence contains unprecedented opportunities.

In this wave widely recognized as a new productivity revolution, China's industry is evolving rapidly. Data shows that the scale of China's core AI industry has exceeded 900 billion yuan. As of September 2025, the number of artificial intelligence enterprises has exceeded 5,300, accounting for 15% of the world, forming a complete industrial system covering the basic foundation, model framework, and industry applications.

Qiming Venture Partners has deeply participated in this process. It is not only active on the front line of AI entrepreneurship, supporting the rise of industry benchmark enterprises, but also truly accelerating the transformation of AI technology from the laboratory to real - life scenarios.

Although there is no shortage of discussions about the "AI bubble" in the upsurge, this team's confidence in China's AI remains firm. They firmly believe that "investing in AI is the greatest certainty in China's investment in the next 20 years."

"There is no bubble in China's AI," Kuang Ziping recently made a clear judgment. The logic is that China has a huge market and a highly competitive talent pool, but the scale of institutional funds invested in AI is still significantly lower than that in the United States. This relatively rational pace actually leaves room for long - term layout. "Referring to the development path of the mobile Internet, China is about to witness an explosion in the application of AI," Kuang Ziping said.

Zhou Zhifeng also analyzed that China's huge market, excellent technological capabilities and talent reserve, and the outstanding experience and ability in creating applications cultivated and accumulated over the past 20 years have laid a good foundation for leading the next - generation of AI - native applications. "In the AI era, great Chinese technology companies are in the making."

To discover the next wave of great AI companies, Qiming Venture Partners has established a leading - scale full - time AI investment team among domestic VCs and continuously introduced post - 95s new - generation investors. They bring a perception and expression closer to the technological frontier and inject a young perspective of continuous evolution into the institution.

At present, Qiming Venture Partners believes that AI is the biggest paradigm shift in the next two decades, and no one wants to miss this epic technological wave. As Kuang Ziping said, "We believe that artificial intelligence will benefit all mankind. The problems solved by artificial intelligence are common to humanity, and the benefits it brings should be shared by everyone." And this round of AI listing wave may only be the beginning of a more grand narrative.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment World" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Zhou Jiali and published by 36Kr with authorization.