Tencent heavily backs an IPO

Image Source: Visual China

Author / Yang Jiyun

Report / PEdaily

A blockbuster Shenzhen IPO is coming.

Recently, the ChiNext IPO application of Shenzhen Yunbao Intelligent Co., Ltd. ("Yunbao Intelligent") was officially accepted by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, making it another enterprise that adopts the fourth set of ChiNext listing standards to apply for a public offering, sprinting to become the "first domestic DPU stock".

Looking back 6 years ago, Stanford PhD Xiao Qiyang founded Yunbao Intelligent in Shenzhen, focusing on the DPU track. Two months after the team set sail, the hundred-billion-yuan DPU market began to explode. To date, he is backed by a long list of investors including Tencent.

Tencent is undoubtedly the largest investor and has become the largest shareholder of Yunbao Intelligent. Along with Nexperia, which is backed by Guangdong state-owned capital, Yunbao Intelligent has become another landmark semiconductor case in the Greater Bay Area.

Stanford PhD's Shenzhen Unicorn Is on the Verge of IPO

Let's start with founder Xiao Qiyang.

He was born in Hong Kong, China, and went to the United States for further studies in his early years, with a stunning academic resume: he graduated summa cum laude from New York University (Bachelor of Mathematics and Bachelor of Computer Science) and Cooper Union (Bachelor of Electrical Engineering) at the same time, obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University at the age of 24, and later taught at the University of California, Irvine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During his doctoral studies, Xiao Qiyang focused on artificial intelligence and neural networks. One of his achievements solved a theoretical problem that had remained unsolved in the AI field for more than 30 years, earning high praise from Marvin Minsky, the "Father of Artificial Intelligence", who personally wrote a preface for his work.

His first entrepreneurial endeavor was in 2002, when he co-founded the chip company RMI in Silicon Valley, which was later acquired by Broadcom for a staggering $3.7 billion in cash, shocking the entire industry.

In 2020, witnessing the opportunity for domestic substitution of computing power, Xiao Qiyang started his second business. Considering China's talent pool and cost advantages, he returned to Shenzhen in August that year to establish Yunbao Intelligent — focusing on DPU at a time when many people were still discussing CPUs and GPUs.

Coincidentally, soon after, NVIDIA officially introduced the DPU concept at the GTC conference, with Jensen Huang proposing the "CPU + DPU + GPU" three-core strategy, and the DPU track quickly became a fiercely contested battlefield.

Since then, Yunbao Intelligent has risen rapidly. It independently developed China's first high-performance, general-purpose programmable DPU SoC chip, with a network bandwidth of 400Gbps, delivering a 4x performance improvement and over 50% power consumption reduction compared to traditional solutions. It completed the entire process from FPGA verification to 6nm SoC mass production in just 4 years.

According to the prospectus, Yunbao Intelligent currently provides one-stop solutions covering features such as elastic networking and storage, virtualization, security, and low-latency RDMA.

Prospectus

The prospectus shows that Yunbao Intelligent's operating revenue in 2023, 2024, and 2025 was 170,000 yuan, 36.35 million yuan, and 370 million yuan respectively; its net losses were 667 million yuan, 600 million yuan, and 1.19 billion yuan respectively; its non-GAAP net losses were 670 million yuan, 620 million yuan, and 560 million yuan respectively. Despite its 2025 revenue growing by over 900% year-on-year, Yunbao Intelligent remains in a loss-making state.

As a result, another super-sized IPO has emerged in Shenzhen.

Packed with VC/PE Investors, Tencent Becomes the Largest Shareholder

Chip entrepreneurship is undoubtedly a capital-intensive endeavor that consumes huge amounts of money.

Prior to submitting its prospectus, Yunbao Intelligent had completed several rounds of financing. As early as the end of 2020, just two months after the company was registered, it secured a seed round of financing with support from institutional investors including 5Y Capital, ZhenFund, SMIC PE, Huatian Tiancheng, Yunqi Partners, and Hongzhuo Capital.

Six months later, Yunbao Intelligent completed an impressive angel round of financing, with participants including Sequoia China, Shenzhen Venture Capital, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Huatian Tiancheng, and QBN Capital. Xiao Qiyang once mentioned in a speech, "When I founded Yunbao Intelligent, I was alone. I didn't dare to recruit the founding team until I secured the angel round."

It was in this round that Yunbao Intelligent's most important shareholder to date emerged — Tencent. This marked Tencent's first entry into the company, followed by successive heavy investments.

In September 2021, Yunbao Intelligent closed its Series A financing, with Tencent investing hundreds of millions of yuan. Other investors included existing shareholders such as Sequoia China, Shenzhen Venture Capital, and 5Y Capital, as well as Temasek, NIO Capital, ZhenFund, Yicun Capital (an investment platform under Huaxi Village Co., Ltd.), Minyin Capital (a listed financial holding platform of Minsheng Bank), and Yunqi Partners, among others.

By then, Yunbao Intelligent had become a domestic DPU unicorn.

Subsequent financing progressed rapidly — in 2023, it received investments from Yangguang Insurance, Guoxin Capital, Runxin New Vision Industrial Fund, etc. After 2024, government guidance funds entered the scene, with the Shenzhen Municipal Guidance Fund and Bao'an District Industrial Investment Guidance Fund participating in the Series B financing; in 2025, three Hangzhou state-owned capital entities including IDG Capital, Hangzhou Industrial Investment, Hangshi Asset Management, and Xiaoshan Capital, as well as industrial partners such as Pengding Holdings and Cloud Apex Information, all joined the investment, alongside existing shareholders.

At the end of November 2025, several local Shenzhen VCs including Tongchuang Weiye, Oriental Fortune Capital, and Juyuan Capital invested in the company, with IDG Capital and Tencent participating again. Since then, the company's valuation has exceeded 14 billion yuan.

Prior to the IPO, Tencent became the largest shareholder of Yunbao Intelligent with a 19.7792% stake through related entities, while the company's actual controllers Xiao Qiyang and Zhang Xueli collectively hold 7.1520% of the company's equity directly, and indirectly control 22.6588% of the voting rights through two shareholding platforms, Yunbao Chuangxin and Yunbao Chuangzhi.

This also highlights a potential risk: as the largest shareholder, Tencent's future shareholding increases or decreases in the secondary market may impact the stability of the company's control.

ChiNext Window: The Greater Bay Area Usher in an IPO Boom

It's finally Shenzhen's turn.

For a long time in the past, Shenzhen's labels in the semiconductor sector were more focused on "consumer electronics applications" and "end-product manufacturing". In this wave of AI computing power explosion, the capital competition surrounding domestic computing power is accelerating comprehensively, and Shenzhen urgently needs a super-sized IPO that represents underlying core technologies.

In the previous IPO wave of domestic GPUs, companies such as Moore Threads, Moffett AI, and Biren Technology were mostly concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and other regions. Now, Yunbao Intelligent's sprint to become the "first domestic DPU stock" perfectly fills an important gap for Shenzhen in the field of "infrastructure chips".

Looking ahead, the capitalization of the semiconductor industry in the Greater Bay Area is forming a tiered development effect.

Not long ago, the ChiNext IPO of Nexperia Semiconductor Co., Ltd. ("Nexperia") was successfully approved, with plans to raise 7.5 billion yuan. For investors, this was also a long-term bet — eight years ago, Nexperia started from a vacant lot in Huangpu, Guangzhou, and later became the first 12-inch wafer manufacturing enterprise to achieve mass production in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Along the way, behind this Guangzhou super unicorn, Guangdong state-owned capital has been involved in almost every round of financing, placing high hopes on the company.

It appears that Nexperia represents the Greater Bay Area's breakthrough in the wafer manufacturing sector, while Yunbao Intelligent represents the region's breakthrough in high-end chip design (DPU).

At this moment, they are riding the wave of the ChiNext reform dividend.

Nexperia chose to apply the third set of ChiNext listing standards, becoming the second unprofitable enterprise to get approved on ChiNext after Dapuwei. In April this year, ChiNext officially launched the "fourth set of listing standards", which values R&D investment and market capitalization rather than short-term net profit, and Yunbao Intelligent's IPO has since advanced smoothly. Both companies are sending a signal to hard technology enterprises — as long as the technology is excellent, R&D investment is sufficient, and growth potential is strong, the door to the capital market is wide open.

The ChiNext market is becoming vibrant. Since September 2024, the ChiNext Index has risen by about 150% cumulatively, becoming one of the most prominent main lines in the A-share market. Looking around, ChiNext has become one of the capital market samples with the highest concentration of hard technology companies in China.

Among them, the hard technology legion of the Greater Bay Area has already sounded the clarion call for breakthroughs.

This article is from the WeChat public account "PEdaily", author: Yang Jiyun, published by 36Kr with authorization.