From investor to manager, the key woman behind Wofei's several rounds of financing in one year.

In late October in Shenzhen, the summer heat still lingers. In an office of less than 20 square meters, Gu Wenting is sitting in front of the camera in a white dress. Several glaring lights surround her, raising the temperature around her by several degrees.

At this point, the shooting has been going on for more than an hour. Facing the teleprompter, she quickly finishes the lines and then gets up to drink some water at the desk. Immediately, she adjusts her state and throws herself into the conversation with 36Kr.

Under normal circumstances, people are accustomed to dividing a day into three periods: morning, noon, and evening. But Gu Wenting has become accustomed to working in hourly rotations, with her schedule filled with large and small meetings. The night before, she just flew back to Shenzhen from the headquarters of Chengdu Volocopter in Chengdu.

Since June, after the successful second-phase test flight of Volocopter's fully self-developed pure electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) AE200, its exhibition hall has become a new generation of popular check-in place. As the chairman of Volocopter, Gu Wenting receives many intentions from local governments and institutions to visit the site every day. Travelling to multiple places to meet investors in a crowded schedule has become the norm for her work.

This year is called the "first year of the low-altitude economy". As a new and comprehensive economic form, the low-altitude economy is rising rapidly and has attracted a large number of capitals' attention to the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, including low-altitude aircraft such as eVTOL and unmanned aerial vehicles.

As a star enterprise in the eVTOL track, Volocopter is backed by Geely, the major shareholder, which provides strong and stable financial and resource support. But obviously, Volocopter's goal is not satisfied with "survival". When a new era comes, it is the game of the brave to face the sky and the strong wind.

In the past two years when the market has cooled down, it is Volocopter that actively proposed market-oriented financing. The driving force behind it is precisely Gu Wenting.

Before joining Geely, Gu Wenting served as a partner of Songhe Capital for many years. The change of identity from a financial investor to a specific enterprise has enabled Gu Wenting to form an independent and unique perspective when judging targets and projects.

She deeply understands that sufficient funds are the foundation for an enterprise with innovation and creation as the core driving force. She also clearly realizes that free management can provide a broad living space for giving full play to the subjective initiative of R & D and product personnel.

So we can see that during Gu Wenting's entry into Geely and her management of Volocopter, the enterprise quickly completed a financing of more than 1 billion yuan, and through the phased leading technical achievements, has made sufficient preparations for the fierce battles that are coming or will come.

Anchor in One Direction

Getting the investment from Hualong Aviation was not as easy as Gu Wenting imagined.

At that time, Gu Wenting had been in charge of the Volocopter project for only more than 2 months. She has known Zhang Yang, the chairman of Huakong Capital and its subsidiary Hualong Aviation, for many years. When Gu Wenting was still at Songhe Capital in the early years, the two often communicated.

Gu Wenting is concerned about fields such as semiconductors, new energy, biomedicine, and AI, and she is particularly interested in unmanned aerial vehicles. Therefore, when Geely extended an olive branch to her, Gu Wenting did not hesitate much and joined.

From the perspectives of personnel structure, site scale, resources and technology, Volocopter was still very small at that time. Its predecessor was Sichuan Aossci Technology Co., Ltd. In 2020, Aossci officially joined Geely and was renamed Volocopter after restructuring with Taili, which focuses on eVTOL technology research and development and production.

The company's funds are composed of two major parts. One part is the result of the split of the original Aossci financing, and the other major part comes from Geely's investment. It can be said that before Gu Wenting took over, Volocopter was operating in the mode of a wholly-owned subsidiary incubated by Geely.

This model has its advantages. The battery, motor, and control system used in eVTOL have a large degree of sharing with the new energy vehicle field. 60% of them, based on the integration and reuse of the same supply chain resources as Geely Automobile Manufacturing, have a strong low-cost and large-scale mass production capacity, which can effectively reduce the production cost of eVTOL.

But at the same time, this composition also has its limitations. "The remaining 40% belongs to the same supply chain system as the core components of traditional aircraft. As the major shareholder, Geely may not necessarily have these advantages. In this context, we need more resource support from shareholders throughout the entire chain," Gu Wenting analyzed.

Gu Wenting firmly believes that the wave of globalization is an inevitable trend, and the low-altitude economy has unlimited potential. As an active participant in the industry, Volocopter wants to have a place in the future international competition. It cannot rely only on the major shareholder, but must obtain a better configuration through market forces, attract the support of more industrial capital and financial capital, and form a benign interaction chain through the integration and coordination of the upstream and downstream.

She spent several weeks collecting data and conducting research, discussing ideas with investors, and sorting out the target capital profile. The first one, Gu Wenting thought of Huakong Capital.

Huakong Capital has rich investment experience in advanced manufacturing, high-end equipment and other fields. Chairman Zhang Yang has been paying attention to the aviation industry for many years and has deep insights. Therefore, when Gu Wenting brought the Volocopter project to Zhang Yang, without much introduction, Zhang Yang could see its value.

But in the new airspace, behind the adventure, there is often the full rationality of the capitalists. They want to see the foreseeable business blueprint of the new thing, and no one is willing to pay for the fragile vision and risk.

Even though the two have known each other for many years, on the matter of whether to invest in Volocopter or not, the two sides still launched a seesaw battle.

We all know the final result. With strong business ability and professional quality, Gu Wenting persuaded Zhang Yang and won the first financing for Volocopter. At the same time, as the first-round investor of Volocopter, Huakong Capital has subsequently made three more rounds of follow-up investments.

Back in the board of directors. The injection of Huakong Capital gave Gu Wenting sufficient confidence. She brought the prepared materials, a thick stack of plans, and the investment intentions of Huakong Capital and other investors in Volocopter, and successfully obtained the approval of the board of directors.

"Investment is an industry with a high degree of uncertainty, but I enjoy the process of finding certainty in this uncertainty. In investment in the technology field, from the very beginning, it is necessary to be clear about what you want? What does the company need for its subsequent development? Only by sorting out and controlling each link as clearly as possible can the final result tend to be the ideal state," Gu Wenting said.

Judging from the several rounds of financing that have been completed, in the selection of angel round and Pre-A round shareholders, Volocopter has introduced several representative investors in the low-altitude field industrial end.

Take Huakong Capital as an example. Hualong Aviation, a subsidiary of Huakong Capital, has signed a 100-unit eVTOL order with Volocopter, ensuring the early capital return and stable cash flow, and it is also an important way for Volocopter to undergo market-oriented tests.

It is also from Hualong Aviation that more and more institutions have found Gu Wenting and her team, hoping to purchase Volocopter's eVTOL and participate in the next commercial landing.

Solve Uncertain Factors

On May 28, 2020, when Gu Wenting stood on the top of Mount Qomolangma at an altitude of 8,848.86 meters and looked into the distance, the long-accumulated energy in her heart finally dissipated.

Although the destination is fixed, for people who are not very familiar with mountaineering, usually, they are more likely to feel nervous, anxious, and physically exhausted about the subsequent uncertain journey during the climb, and then give up halfway.

Gu Wenting reached the summit of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest peak in the world, two years before she climbed Mount Qomolangma. Cho Oyu is 8,201 meters above sea level. Facing only more than 600 meters away from Mount Qomolangma, Gu Wenting was very hesitant.

She knew that climbing Mount Qomolangma is a matter with a mortality rate. Many voices around her discouraged Gu Wenting, "It is already very amazing to be able to climb the sixth highest peak. There is no need to risk your life." But she thought otherwise, "I have climbed more than 8,000 meters, and there are less than 700 meters left. If I don't give it a try, I will regret it one day."

In high-altitude areas, the thin air will put great pressure on the human body, and it is necessary to face the long-term physical and psychological consumption. Therefore, Gu Wenting, who decided to climb Mount Qomolangma, began to think about the next question: How to make the probability of coming back alive a little higher.

Gu Wenting runs a fixed 5 kilometers every morning and climbs the stairs as soon as she gets off work. The total number of floors in the building is 25. Gu Wenting climbs 6 times fixed, with a base of 150 floors. On weekends, she would also go to Wutong Mountain in Shenzhen specially. In the summer with a temperature of 40 degrees, she would travel back and forth for 8 hours. Often, when she was walking, there would be only herself left on the road. Gu Wenting persisted in this way for half a year without fail.

When that day really came, Gu Wenting was not so nervous. The weather on that day was not very good, and the snowstorm along the way blew people's faces painfully. From an altitude of 8,200 meters, it is the most difficult "no-rescue area". There are many remains of victims along the way. Every 10 meters forward, Gu Wenting felt that the body temperature was a little colder. The mountain is about 90 degrees upright. She gathered her strength and climbed up along the narrow stone crevices.

Doing her best, she also saw the results. The physical exhaustion dissipated the moment Gu Wenting reached the summit, and a series of anxieties in daily life and work were left behind.

All along, people who are familiar with Gu Wenting can always clearly feel her relaxation. This feeling has become even stronger after she returned from climbing Mount Qomolangma.

But action and state are only the surface. Deeper down, it stems from Gu Wenting's sense of control over everything, and taking action after making sufficient preparations. She likes to use the "scoring system" to judge a thing: Assuming that there are 1 to 10 influencing factors for an event, and 9 of them are uncertain factors. When designing the achievement path, Gu Wenting will preset multiple plans ABC until the 9 uncertain factors are reduced to 5 or 4, to minimize the risk factor of the thing as much as possible.

This logical method is the same when she climbed Mount Qomolangma and also in her work.

In the years at Songhe Capital, Gu Wenting almost rotated through all management positions. After joining Geely, the transformation from a financial investor to an industrial investor has also brought her a sense of freshness and challenges. The perspective shift requires Gu Wenting to deeply understand the Volocopter entity, think about its ecological position, technical path, future commercial landing and sales model in the eVTOL industrial chain. What are the current difficulties of eVTOL technology? Which parameters need to be adjusted when it is matched and connected with other industries? How to evaluate the various parameters and safety tests of the batteries used in automobiles and those used in eVTOL? All these require Gu Wenting to really participate in the daily operation of Volocopter.

In order to keep up with the team's progress in a timely manner, Gu Wenting participates in the weekly regular meeting and the monthly management meeting, communicates and summarizes the problems encountered by the team, and prepares sufficient solutions before presenting opinions to the board of directors.

Gu Wenting always says, "I never fight a battle without preparation." Since Volocopter started financing, in more than a year, Gu Wenting led the team and obtained sufficient funds for it in the market. Based on this, it also provides a broad growth space for Volocopter's successive technological research and development, product test flights and commercial exploration.

Low-Altitude Takeoff

In a generation's time, there are always such moments. Some products are born from the dim basements of engineering departments, the bedrooms of nerds with a hard-to-cover smell, or the homes of those who have a great enthusiasm for a certain job. Then this transformative technology becomes a tool that everyone can use.

FORTUNE magazine once used this passage to describe the era of web browsers at the end of the 20th century and the era of smartphones before the iPhone was launched in 2007.

The sky is vast, and people's yearning and exploration for it have never stopped. In 1903, the Wright brothers' first flight unveiled the beginning of the history of human-powered aviation. And until more than 120 years later, the continuous progress of low-altitude aircraft technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles and eVTOL has promoted the gradual takeoff of the low-altitude economy and has become a new driving force for economic and social development.

On June 23 this year, Volocopter conducted the second-phase test flight and successfully completed various test items such as the full envelope and full weight, and the full envelope tilt conversion, becoming the first enterprise in China and the second enterprise in the world to complete this test project.

Gu Wenting's most obvious perception is that since the second half of last year, the outside world's