"Group buying" is popular in the primary market.
The list of investors in a project is getting longer and longer.
Open the financing announcements of any star company in the past year. What stands out most is not the financing amount, but the list of investors - state-owned funds, local guiding funds, insurance institutions, industrial capital, top VCs, and follow-on investments from old shareholders. The list often includes a dozen or even more than twenty institutions.
In January 2026, Jieyue Xingchen announced the completion of a Series B+ financing of over 5 billion RMB. Participating institutions include Shanghai Guotou Leading Fund, China Life Equity, Pudong Venture Capital, Xuhui Capital, Wuxi Liangxi Fund, Xiamen ITG, and industrial capital such as Huaqin Technology, as well as old shareholders like Tencent, Qiming Venture Partners, and Wuyuan Capital. There are more than ten institutions publicly disclosed, and the actual number of participants may be even greater.
Obviously, this is not an isolated case. The latest incident occurred in April this year. Jijia Shijie announced the completion of a nearly 1.5 billion RMB Series B1 financing. The list of investors in this round includes more than ten institutions such as technology giants, national team funds, state-owned platforms, industrial capital, and dual-currency financial institutions.
From the large model track to embodied intelligence, from semiconductors to biomedicine, more and more financing cases present the same characteristic: one project is invested in by twenty institutions. If we use one word to summarize the current investment style in the market, it is probably that "group buying" is popular in the primary market.
The Era of "Lead Investor Reigns Supreme" Is Fading Away
There was a time when being a lead investor was an honor.
An institution monopolizing a large share, enjoying the best terms, and independently pricing a company was a symbol of a GP's strength in the golden era. However, after the freeze in 2023 and the slow recovery in 2024, from the second half of 2025 to the present, the financing structure in the primary market has quietly undergone a fundamental change.
The most intuitive signal comes from the "doubling" of the investor list. Take Jieyue Xingchen's Series B+ financing as an example. In this 5 billion RMB transaction that set a new record for a single financing in the large model track, at least three types of funds with different attributes gathered: Shanghai municipal state-owned capital represented by Shanghai Guotou Leading Fund, insurance institutions represented by China Life Equity, industrial capital represented by Huaqin Technology, and follow-on investments from market-oriented VCs like Qiming and Wuyuan.
Some industry observers describe this structure as "distributed and deep pockets." Similar scenarios are also frequently played out in the embodied intelligence track. On April 8th, Digua Robotics announced the completion of a $150 million Series B2 financing. This round of financing was jointly supported by strategic investment institutions such as a retail technology and supply chain giant, Prosperity7 Venture Capital Fund, and Envision Group, as well as first-tier financial investment institutions such as Muhua Kechuang, Yunfeng Fund, Huakong Fund (T-Capital), LOOK CAPITAL, and Kailian Capital. Old shareholders such as Hillhouse Venture Capital, Hexuan Capital, Linear Capital, Huangpu River Capital, Didi, Wuyuan Capital, Chuxin Capital, Meihua Ventures, and Vertex Growth under Temasek continued to make follow-on investments.
Financial capital, industrial giants, and state-owned funds gather at the table. The number of investors in a single project is generally more than five, and for top projects, it often exceeds double digits.
It is worth mentioning that this "group buying" investment structure is not the optimal solution actively chosen by investors, but an equilibrium result after the game of multiple forces.
On the one hand, in the context of shrinking management scale and cautious LP contributions, a single institution has limited ammunition for a single investment. On the other hand, the valuations of top projects are sky-high, and the financing volume of dozens of billions of RMB is far beyond the capacity of a single institution. The deeper reason is that when uncertainty becomes the norm, "risk diversification" is no longer just an asset allocation logic at the LP level, but has begun to penetrate into the single investment decisions of GPs.
According to Rongzhong data, 103 new private fund managers were added in 2025, with a year-on-year growth rate decline of 13%. This data reflects the regulatory idea of the Asset Management Association of China to continuously tighten the issuance of licenses. From the composition of the top 20 new managers in terms of registered scale, there are three clear characteristics: first, state-owned enterprises and central enterprises represented by Guoxin, Chengneng, China Mobile, and Chengtong; second, local government investment platforms in the Yangtze River Delta at the provincial and municipal levels; third, institutions in line with major national policies, such as the launch of the Jiangsu Strategic Emerging Industry Fund before and the establishment of several regional funds by the social security fund last year. The new managers of institutions such as Jiangsu Venture Capital and Zhejiang Innovation Investment were established under this background.
In other words, most of the money in the industry is managed by state-owned institutions. These funds naturally have the genes of "prudent investment and diversified holdings." When they become the most important capital providers in the primary market, "group buying" is almost inevitable. An investor active in the hard technology track admitted that in today's investment decision-making meetings, the most frequently heard sentence is not "Should we invest?" but "Who else is investing?" Investment decisions have gradually evolved from independent judgment to collective confirmation.
Zhu Shan, the chairman of Rongzhong, also said in his speech "Answering 2025: The Evolution of China's Equity Investment Landscape" that different from the past, the investment in current top projects shows obvious characteristics of "group investment and collective investment." The financing parties of each enterprise are composed of multiple institutions, including top institutions from different investment lines such as industrial capital, state-owned investment platforms, financial institutions, and market-oriented investment institutions.
Who Is "Group Buying"?
The rise of "group buying" actually reflects the profound reshaping of the capital structure in the primary market.
Looking back over the past decade, the capital supply in the Chinese VC/PE market has undergone at least three major structural migrations. Around 2015, RMB funds emerged, and government guiding funds entered the market on a large scale. In 2018, after the implementation of the new asset management regulations, channel funds such as bank wealth management retreated, and US dollar funds once dominated the pricing power of top projects. Since 2023, with the continuous tightening of the fundraising side and the serious congestion on the exit side, the market has entered a new stage, in which state-owned capital has become the largest contributor, insurance funds have accelerated their entry, and industrial capital has moved from the supporting role to the center of the stage.
This means that the portraits of "golden sponsors" and the preferences for "targets" in the primary market have completely changed - the LP structure dominated by state-owned capital and the project structure dominated by hard technology naturally give rise to the investment paradigm of "multiple institutions joining hands."
On the policy side, "patient capital" is changing from a slogan to a mechanism. The 2026 Government Work Report clearly stated: "Make efficient use of the national venture capital guiding fund, vigorously develop venture capital and angel investment. Government investment funds should take the lead in being patient capital to promote more start-up enterprises to grow into leading technology enterprises quickly," and at the same time, it requires "expanding the exit channels for private equity and venture capital funds and increasing the proportion of direct financing and equity financing." This is the most extensive mention of the venture capital industry in the government work report over the years.
At the institutional level, the national venture capital guiding fund launched in December 2025 has a 20-year term (10-year investment period plus 10-year exit period) and requires that the scale of sub-funds invested in seed-stage and start-up enterprises should not be less than 70%, which precisely addresses the long-standing problem of the mismatch between the "5+2" fund term and the hard technology cultivation cycle in the industry.
These policy signals converge at the front line of the primary market and directly change the ecosystem of the financing scene.
According to Rongzhong data, in January 2026, a total of 862 new investment events occurred in the Chinese VC/PE market, with an investment amount of approximately 96.7 billion RMB. However, when looking at the financing amount structure in detail, it can be found that the polarization between hot and cold is extremely severe. The number of small-scale transactions below 50 million RMB and large-scale transactions above 1 billion RMB has increased significantly, while the number of medium-scale transactions has continued to shrink. Even the financing scale of the early angel and seed rounds of some projects has reached the level of hundreds of millions of RMB.
In other words, capital is concentrating at both ends - either invest early, in small projects, or in seed projects, with a few million RMB for trial and error; or embrace the top projects and bet in groups, with more than a dozen institutions working together to complete a large-scale transaction. The growth-stage projects in the middle have become the most difficult group to raise funds.
This "dumbbell-shaped" capital distribution and the popularity of "group buying" are mutually causal.
When a large amount of capital in the market chases a few projects with higher certainty, the financing of top enterprises is no longer about "selecting investors," but about "allocating quotas." In the latest round of financing of a large model company, more than thirty institutions expressed investment intentions, but less than half of them could get the quota. Under this supply-demand relationship, the screening criteria of start-up companies for investors are also changing.
Take Jieyue Xingchen as an example. Huaqin Technology, the global leader in smartphone ODM, joined the investor camp, which is highly consistent with its "AI + terminal" strategy. The participation of local state-owned capital such as Wuxi Liangxi Fund and Xiamen ITG means that the company will receive more direct policy support for its industrial implementation in the Yangtze River Delta and the southeast coast.
On the other hand, "group buying" may also be that start-up companies are actively weaving an industrial network composed of capital relationships.
How Long Can the "Group Meal" Last?
When "group buying" becomes the norm, the rules of the game in the primary market are being rewritten.
The most direct impact occurs within investment institutions. In the past, the investment return of a project was directly related to the single investment scale. The more you invested, the greater the return.
However, today, in the pattern of multiple institutions holding shares in a dispersed manner, the shareholding ratio of a single institution has been significantly diluted. For example, in the era of "lead investor reigns supreme," there used to be a situation of one strong and multiple super investors behind an IPO. But now, as more and more investors participate, although the book return obtained by institutions may increase, after being shared among more participants, the average return of a single institution has not increased significantly.
The most direct impact is that even if a medium-sized VC invests in the next unicorn but only gets a quota of tens of millions, its contribution to the overall return of the fund is quite limited. This means that GPs must "grab" enough positions in more projects to piece together a complete return puzzle.
The investment logic has quietly shifted from "heavily betting on a few projects" to "casting a wide net to seize shares." On the surface, it seems more stable, but in fact, it puts forward higher requirements for the project screening efficiency and post-investment management ability of institutions.
For start-up companies, "group buying" is both a blessing and a concern. The good news is that financing is no longer tied to a single institution. A diversified shareholder structure means more abundant resource introduction and a more balanced distribution of decision-making power. The 2026 Government Work Report emphasized the need to "promote more start-up enterprises to grow into leading technology enterprises quickly," and a diverse group of shareholders precisely provides support for industrial collaboration in this path - state-owned capital brings policy implementation channels, industrial capital brings upstream and downstream orders, and market-oriented VCs bring governance experience and brand endorsement.
The latest incident occurred on April 7th. The Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Promoting the High-quality Development of Private Equity Investment Funds of Enterprises under the Supervision of the Shanghai SASAC," proposing to "encourage supervised enterprises to initiate the establishment of venture capital funds, focusing on investing early, in small projects, for the long term, and in hard technology," "encourage leading enterprises to establish corporate venture capital funds (CVC funds) to incubate science and technology innovation projects around the innovation chain," and "encourage supervised enterprises to increase the establishment of S funds, merger and acquisition funds, etc."
However, the cost on the other side is also real: when a round of financing involves more than a dozen institutions, the complexity of clause negotiation increases exponentially, the delivery cycle is significantly lengthened, and founders need to spend a lot of time dealing with the demands of different investors.
What is even more worthy of vigilance is that in the context of the incomplete unblocking of the exit side, too many financial investors on the same equity table may pose a risk of "exit stampede" in the subsequent financing or IPO stage - when everyone is waiting for an exit window, the window is often narrower than expected.
Fortunately, there is a forward-looking layout at the policy level. The Government Work Report proposed to "expand the exit channels for private equity and venture capital funds." At the same time, the institutional design of the national venture capital guiding fund with a 10-year investment period and a 10-year exit period also provides enough buffer space for "group buying."
From a more macro perspective, the essence of "group buying" is a return to market rationality.
In an era of abundant liquidity and inflated valuation bubbles, exclusive heavy investment was a way for VCs to show their confidence. But today, with the narrowing of exit channels and high DPI pressure, diversified holdings and reducing single risk exposure are reasonable risk control choices.
In a sense, investors have changed from "going all in at the gambling table" to "sharing a meal at the table" - everyone contributes a share of money, orders a table of dishes, shares the risks, and also shares the benefits. This may not be the most exciting investment posture, but it may be the most practical survival strategy in this cycle.
Of course, "group buying" will not be the end.
When the market completes a thorough clearance, and when real top projects prove their value through listing and profitability, institutions that have the ability to make independent judgments and dare to make exclusive heavy investments will ultimately regain excess returns. But in this current transitional period full of uncertainties, more investors have chosen a safer stance, not running independently in the front, but walking side by side.
After all, in the winter of the primary market, huddling together for warmth is itself a kind of ability.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital). The author is Feng Xiaoting, and the editor is Wu Ren. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.