Entrepreneurs Graduated from This Hong Kong University Raised 1.5 Billion RMB in H1, Backed by Top VCs Including Hillhouse and HSG
When it comes to the entrepreneurial forces of domestic university departments, the Tsinghua University alumni are undoubtedly among the top. In addition to well - known mainland universities such as Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong, we have observed that in recent years, several Hong Kong universities, like the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), have also been making efforts to establish the path for the transformation of scientific research and technological achievements.
Next, we will plan several articles on entrepreneurs from Hong Kong universities, focusing on popular sectors such as AI, to see the innovation and entrepreneurship directions of professors, students, and graduates from Hong Kong universities.
In this article, we first focus on The Chinese University of Hong Kong, hereinafter referred to as CUHK.
When it comes to the graduates of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Xu Li and the AI listed company SenseTime he founded are the most well - known benchmark cases. In fact, in recent years, a group of emerging AI entrepreneurs from CUHK have been rising rapidly.
According to IT Juzi data, in the first half of 2026 alone, entrepreneurs who graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong had 15 emerging enterprises stand out and complete financing, with the total financing amount estimated to exceed 1.5 billion RMB.
First - tier star institutions such as Ant Group, Baidu Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Sequoia China Seed Fund, Matrix Partners China, and Hillhouse Venture Capital have all made investments. Entrepreneurs from CUHK are becoming a non - negligible force in China's AI and embodied intelligence sectors.
15 startups have intensive financing, all for AI/embodied intelligence projects
From January to June 2026, entrepreneurs from the CUHK circle presented an outstanding report card: 15 enterprises completed financing, with the cumulative amount estimated to exceed 1.5 billion RMB.
From the data, three key characteristics clearly emerge from these financed enterprises.
Firstly, Embodied intelligence and AI dominate the field
Looking at the industry distribution of the projects, only one new energy company, "YiChi New Energy", was incubated by a CUHK professor leading a team and received investment from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Apart from that, artificial intelligence and embodied intelligence divide the market, with 8 and 6 relevant invested companies respectively.
However, the distribution of the total financing amount is uneven. The 6 enterprises in the embodied intelligence (robotics) sector have secured approximately 1.14 billion RMB, accounting for 76%. Among them, UniXAI, Jianzhi Robotics, and OlaDimensions have each received hundreds of millions of RMB in financing and are at the forefront.
Secondly, Early - stage projects are clustered
Most of the invested enterprises were established after 2024, with an average establishment period of only two years. Most of them (8) are in the angel round of financing, and several are in the seed round. There are few in the Pre - A and A rounds, indicating that a large number of emerging entrepreneurs are flocking to the sector.
Thirdly, Investors come from multiple sources
The lineup of investors is comprehensive, covering first - tier VCs, industrial capital, and state - owned funds.
In terms of industrial capital, Baidu Ventures and Ant Group are active investors. For example, Ant and Didi jointly led the investment in Jianzhi Robotics, and even Xiaohongshu invested in an AI e - paper company, "Yuexingtong". Among VC institutions, first - tier institutions such as Sequoia China Seed Fund, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and Matrix Partners China have made frequent investments.
In addition, state - owned funds such as CICC Huirong, China Merchants Capital, and Guangzhou Industrial Investment have entered the market, adding policy endorsement to the projects.
OlaDimensions completed two rounds of financing in 60 days, and capital is vying for Huawei's "Genius Youth"
The resume of Zhou Shunbo, the founder of OlaDimensions, is a typical example of AI entrepreneurs from CUHK.
He is a Ph.D. in robotics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. During his doctoral studies, he focused on research in robot vision control, mobile robots, and 3D reconstruction and understanding. In 2021, Zhou Shunbo joined Huawei as the only selected candidate in the field of intelligent robots under Huawei's "Genius Youth" program.
As the "No. 1 employee" in Huawei's field of embodied intelligence, he built Huawei's largest - scale embodied intelligence team from scratch. He was responsible for Huawei Cloud's embodied intelligence strategic planning for four consecutive years and led the construction of Huawei Cloud's embodied intelligence technology system. He also led the research and development of Huawei Cloud's embodied platform, CloudRobo.
In March 2026, Zhou Shunbo left Huawei to start his own business and invited Zhang Jing, who was formerly a product manager at Amazon AWS and a product director of Huawei's innovative cloud services, to be the co - founder of the new company.
From the laboratory at CUHK to Huawei's technology system and then to independent entrepreneurship, Zhou Shunbo completed a typical three - step jump from "academic research - large - company practice - leaving to start a business".
Completing two rounds of financing totaling hundreds of millions of RMB within 60 days of establishment is quite rare in the embodied intelligence sector.
OlaDimensions was established in March 2026. By April 22, the company announced the completion of a seed - round financing of tens of millions of RMB, jointly invested by Matrix Partners China and Hillhouse Venture Capital. This was Matrix Partners China's first layout in the embodied intelligence sector.
Just 20 days later, on May 13, the company announced the completion of an angel - round financing of hundreds of millions of RMB, led by China Merchants Capital, with participation from SAIF Partners, Jiuhua Capital, Zhuopu Investment, BV Baidu Ventures, and Juhe Investment.
Behind the intensive entry of capital is, on the one hand, a high degree of recognition of the founder Zhou Shunbo. His resume of "Ph.D. in robotics from CUHK + Huawei's Genius Youth + No. 1 employee in embodied intelligence" has unparalleled advantages.
On the other hand, it comes from its differentiated competitive direction.
The home environment is highly unstructured and dynamic, which poses extremely high requirements for the generalization ability and long - term learning ability of robots. Currently, the application of embodied intelligence in the home scenario is still far from mature. OlaDimensions' first Maker - edition product is targeted at the maker and developer community. It adopts the form of "mobile chassis + dual robotic arms", and its core selling point is the development version, which has the ability of rapid learning and continuous improvement.
Users can enable the robot to gradually learn new skills and complete deployment through simple data collection and interactive teaching, adapting to diverse home services. It is positioned as a "cultivation - style" robot.
Jianzhi Robotics, the "shovel - seller" in embodied intelligence, completed four rounds of financing in one year
Jianzhi Robotics was established in May 2025, but it does not produce robot bodies. Instead, it provides data solutions for the entire industry.
Currently, the most recognized bottleneck in the embodied intelligence industry is the lack of training data.
The core products of Jianzhi Robotics include: GenDAS non - intrusive wearable data collection device (capable of high - precision data acquisition from the "head + hands" to the whole body) and the embodied intelligence data production line GenADP, which can output high - quality processed data after 2 hours of collection. It has been deployed in over 100 real - world application scenarios, with a cumulative data volume of over 10,000 hours.
Data collection device of Jianzhi Robotics. Source: Official website
This integrated solution of hardware + software + data service makes it an "infrastructure provider" needed by the industry.
Chen Jianxing, the founder of GenRobot.AI, was the former senior director of algorithms at Momenta and led the planning of Momenta's data - flywheel mass - production technology route. Co - founder Li Xinglong graduated from the School of Computer Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was previously a co - founder at Zhenji Intelligence.
Shifting from autonomous driving to embodied intelligence, Chen Jianxing completed a typical "transfer of technical experience". Both fields need to solve the problems of "perception - decision - control" and require a large amount of real - world data to train models.
Jianzhi Robotics' financing speed is the fastest in the embodied intelligence sector in 2026: it completed four consecutive rounds of financing in less than a year.
In August 2025, it had a seed - round financing led by Baidu Ventures. In December 2025, it announced a seed + round (led by RoboSense) and an angel round (led by Shunwei Capital). In June 2026, it completed a Pre - A - round financing of over 200 million RMB, led by Ant Group, Didi Chuxing, and Delian Capital.
Sequoia - favored Mizzen Technology develops an AI user interview platform
Sun Keqiang is a master's graduate from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from CUHK's MMLab. He has long focused on human - computer interaction and human preference modeling. He led the research and development of the CodecAvatar system for Meta's first - generation virtual human project, which allowed him to accumulate in - depth understanding of human facial expressions, body language, and non - verbal communication.
Before starting his business, he was also responsible for the implementation of vision algorithms for multiple business lines at SenseTime. His dual experience of "China's leading AI company + a US tech giant" enables him to understand both the application scenarios of China's AI industry and have an international perspective on cutting - edge technologies.
In July 2025, he founded Mizzen Technology. The company's core product, MizzenInsight, is China's first AI in - depth interview platform that can achieve "hour - level" delivery, aiming to reconstruct the traditional user research industry with AI.
For enterprises, traditional user research has pain points such as high costs, long cycles, and difficult reuse of results.
Mizzen Technology's solution is to use AI agents to cover the entire process. After an enterprise inputs its research goals, the system automatically generates an interview outline, selects target users, initiates interviews, conducts dynamic follow - up questions, and finally outputs structured analysis results. This compresses the traditional process of several weeks into one day and reduces costs by 90%.
The product was launched in December 2025 and served over 300 enterprise customers within 4 months, including Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Meituan. It has cumulatively completed over 10,000 hours of user interviews.
Only about four months later, in April 2026, Mizzen Technology completed an angel + round of financing of nearly ten million US dollars, led by Sequoia China Seed Fund, with over - subscribed follow - up investments from Fortune Capital and Jiacheng Capital.
It takes ten years to grow trees and a hundred years to cultivate people. There are more AI entrepreneurs from CUHK
The rise of CUHK's AI entrepreneurship legion is largely due to the Multimedia Laboratory (CUHK MMLab) founded by Professor Tang Xiaoou in 2001. The research of MMLab is highly focused on the frontiers of computer vision and machine learning. The generations of AI talents it has cultivated have formed a unique entrepreneurship inheritance network, and many of them have even worked together at SenseTime.
From SenseTime to today's OlaDimensions, Mizzen Technology, and Jianzhi Robotics, the compound background of "academia + industry", the close connection between mentors and entrepreneurs, and the in - depth insight into application scenarios constitute the core code for CUHK's AI entrepreneurs to continuously gain the favor of capital.
In addition, more than a dozen other startups from the CUHK circle have also won the recognition of capital.
Yuexingtong's founder and CEO, Hu Yufei, is a serial entrepreneur. He graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has served as the COO of the unicorn company Neolix, the Chief Development Officer of OYO Hotels in India, and the co - founder and COO of Bluegogo.
In 2024, he founded the AI ultra - portable e - paper brand "Yuexingtong". In January and April this year, it announced angel - round and A - round financings. The latest investors include Shunwei Capital, Matrix Partners China, Xiaohongshu, Boyu Capital, and Wanwu Capital.
In April 2026, xLean completed a Series A financing of tens of millions of US dollars, jointly led by Guofang Innovation, Huaye Tiancheng, Matrix Partners China, Wanshi Capital, and Gaozhang Capital, with participation from existing shareholders.
xLean was established in June 2022. Its founder, Xue Kehan, is a post - 2000 entrepreneur who pursued his Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has won multiple robot competition championships. Its first product, xLeanTR1, took nearly four years to develop and is the world's first dual - form deformable cleaning device that can switch between an "autonomous cleaning robot" and a "hand - held floor scrubber".
MemoraX AI was established in March 2026 and completed a seed - round and a seed + round of financing totaling tens of millions of US dollars within just a few months of its establishment. The company focuses on the personalized memory track of large models, solves the "amnesia" problem of large models, and provides in - model memory solutions.
Founder Hao Jianye pursued his Ph.D. at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007, then went abroad for further studies, and returned to China to join Tianjin University in 2015. He has also served as the director of Huawei's Decision - Inference Laboratory, the director of Huawei's Large - Model Algorithm Laboratory, and the technology president of Huawei's Medical Business Group. He is the chief expert in Huawei's decision - making intelligence direction.
It can be said that in 2026, with the global investment boom in embodied intelligence, the AI entrepreneurs from CUHK cannot be underestimated, and their practices and innovations are worth looking forward to.
This article is from the WeChat official account "IT Juzi" (ID: itjuzi521), written by Wu Meimei and published by 36Kr with authorization.