A HK$600 million fund has been officially launched, with the first batch of 9 projects signed.

A group of hard technology projects from laboratories of Hong Kong's higher education institutions are looking for entry points to the industrial chain in the Chinese mainland.

Recently, the first 9 Hong Kong-Shanghai sci-tech innovation targeted projects under the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund completed the signing ceremony in Hong Kong. As the first fund established through cooperation between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and mainland institutions under the optimized plan of the HKSAR Government's "Innovation and Technology Venture Fund" (ITVF), the fund has Shanghai State-owned Investment Co., Ltd. as the cornerstone investor, CITIC Capital as the manager, Bocom International and Taiping Asset Management (Hong Kong) as co-managers, and the HKSAR Government's Innovation and Technology Venture Fund participates in the capital contribution as a limited partner, with a total fund size of HK$600 million.

The first batch of projects covers three major sectors: artificial intelligence and big data, advanced manufacturing and new energy, and life health technology, including Maizhi Technology, Xihe Intelligent Sensing, Jingzhun Medical and others, all of which are incubated from local university research teams in Hong Kong.

Apart from the project list, what makes this fund more noteworthy is the resource portfolio behind it: on one end are the dense original innovation capabilities and international talents of Hong Kong's universities, and on the other end are the complete industrial chains, application scenarios and engineering capabilities of Shanghai and even the entire Yangtze River Delta region.

Transformation of Scientific Research Achievements from Hong Kong Universities

Professor Yu Bei from the Chinese University of Hong Kong is the lead of the 3D EDA R&D project among the first batch of projects.

Yu Bei has long been engaged in research on the application of machine learning and deep learning in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The project promoted by his team this time targets the integration of AI and 3D chip design, improves the design efficiency of 3D chip EDA tools through AI, and carries out incremental development on the existing tool chain and design process.

As advanced processes continue to approach physical limits, the improvement of chip performance increasingly relies on advanced packaging and 3D stacking. However, moving from 2D design to 3D design is not simply "stacking" chips. The chip structure, interconnection relationship and physical constraints have all become more complex, and the original EDA tools and design processes need to be adjusted accordingly. This brings opportunities for new algorithms and tools, and also means that the project must enter the real chip design process and undergo repeated verification before it can form a usable product.

Yu Bei told the reporter of *Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily* that his team has carried out relevant research in this field for four or five years, and has completed multiple technical prototype verifications and developments at present, with part of the achievements already tested in large chip design enterprises. In the next step, the team plans to further cooperate with EDA enterprises and chip design enterprises in Shanghai to continue development and verification in the existing tool chain and design process, and it is expected that it will still take one to two years to form a truly commercializable product.

It can be seen that from a laboratory achievement to preliminary industrialization verification, there is already a long transformation chain in between.

"To accomplish this, there are several difficulties, including talents, data, engineering, verification and commercialization," said Yu Bei. As a hub of international talents, Hong Kong can help the team solve the talent problem; but the industrial data required for training and improving AI models, the engineering capability to embed algorithms into existing tool chains, and opportunities for customer verification are mostly concentrated on the industrial side.

Shanghai just provides the other half of the capabilities. Yu Bei said that Shanghai gathers terminal enterprises in chip design, EDA, manufacturing, materials and automobile industries, and has a relatively complete semiconductor industrial chain. It is worth mentioning that the 3D EDA R&D project of Yu Bei's team is jointly built with Shanghai-based KLC, a listed company on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board.

Similar transformation demands also appear in Maizhi Technology, an enterprise incubated by the University of Hong Kong.

Maizhi Technology was founded under the leadership of Professor Shen Zuojun, Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Senior Advisor to the President of the University of Hong Kong. Its core direction is to combine AI with operations research and optimization to serve enterprise operation and supply chain management.

Shen Zuojun told the reporter of *Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily* that as China's domestic manufacturing, logistics and supply chain continue to develop towards stages with higher technical content, the technologies of scientists and university researchers have gained broader application space, and industrial competition is further shifting from resource contention to competition of technical capabilities.

But he said bluntly in the interview that starting a business as a scientist requires multi-faceted support including capital and industrial resources. "If a scientist is asked to start a business on his own, it is most likely that he cannot make it."

The starting point of founding Maizhi Technology is closely related to the "Industry-University-Research 1+" plan launched by the HKSAR Government in 2023, which mainly supports scientific research teams of Hong Kong universities to turn achievements from laboratories into commercial products. Shen Zuojun even admitted in the interview, "If there was no such plan, I would not have come out to start a business."

The intervention of the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund this time means that the project has begun to obtain another layer of support — leveraging Shanghai State-owned Investment's connections with mainland industrial resources, enterprise clients and application scenarios to further promote commercial implementation.

A Regional Collaboration Experiment of One Fund

It can be seen that the role of the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund is not only to provide a sum of capital for Hong Kong projects, but more importantly, to bring the industrial resources of Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta into the technology transformation process in advance, which is also the key factor jointly mentioned by many project parties in interviews.

From this perspective, the fund acts as a two-way bridge: the scientific research achievements of Hong Kong universities enter the mainland's industrial chain through this bridge, while Shanghai enterprises can connect with international capital, scientific researchers and overseas markets via Hong Kong. Capital is essentially a link, and what really needs to flow are technologies, data, scenarios, talents and markets.

At the signing ceremony of the first batch of projects, Dong Sun, Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry of the HKSAR Government, also disclosed the process of the initiation and establishment of the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund.

More than two years ago, the HKSAR Government allocated HK$1.5 billion from the Innovation and Technology Venture Fund to launch the optimization plan, under which the Hong Kong government acts as the LP of the fund, cooperates with professional market fund managers, and then matches capital contribution at a ratio of 1:3. Dong Sun admitted that this capital contribution ratio caused controversy at the beginning, with the focus mainly on whether funds from outside the government would be willing to invest real money three times as much as the government's contribution.

The feedback from the market exceeded expectations. He said that after the launch of the optimization plan, more than 60 applications from fund managers were received in total. Among the applicants from the mainland, there are no lack of "central state-owned" institutions and leading local fund management institutions. "The enthusiasm of the whole market response exceeded our expectations."

In the words of Dong Sun, the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund is not only the first joint fund to complete fundraising under the optimization plan, but also the first government innovation and technology fund in Hong Kong's history to raise capital through market-oriented means.

The reporter of *Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily* learned that Shanghai State-owned Investment, the cornerstone investor of the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund, had already started its layout in Hong Kong before the fund was established.

In 2025, Shanghai State-owned Investment set up an office in Hong Kong and established Futeng International (Hong Kong), and has successively established cooperation with many universities in Hong Kong. Its subsidiary Futeng Capital also became one of the first batch of partners of the University of Hong Kong Entrepreneurship Angel Alliance. The establishment of the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund can be said to further integrate the previously scattered cooperation among universities, capital and industries into a set of market-oriented investment mechanisms.

At the moment when science and technology lead economic and industrial progress, scientists and university researchers are participating in the industrial and commercial ecosystem more and more than in the past. As a result, focusing on the transformation of university achievements and scientist entrepreneurship, more and more early-stage hard tech funds, proof-of-concept funds and achievement transformation funds have been set up across various regions in recent years. A briefing released in 2025 by China Institute for Educational Finance Research of Peking University shows that the amount of investment from government guidance funds obtained by university scientist-founded enterprises can conservatively reach about 120 billion yuan per year.

However, local funds usually also undertake the tasks of industrial investment attraction and project landing, and capital, talents and enterprises are usually arranged around their respective regions. The competition among different cities for scientists, laboratory achievements and future industrial projects has also become increasingly fierce.

Therefore, in addition to capital and resources themselves, the Victoria Harbour Bridge Innovation and Technology Fund undoubtedly provides another idea: instead of requiring one region to monopolize all links of the innovation chain, carry out capability combination according to the resource endowments of different regions, so that R&D, incubation, engineering verification, large-scale production, financing and overseas expansion can form division of labor and relay between the two places. Scientific research achievements can be produced in Hong Kong, complete verification and industrialization through enterprises in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta, and then connect with international capital and overseas markets with the help of Hong Kong.

Of course, the fund signing is only the starting point. Whether the first 9 targeted projects can truly enter enterprise scenarios, complete engineering verification and generate commercial revenue still depends on multiple factors such as subsequent data opening, intellectual property arrangement and cross-regional collaboration efficiency.

But if this mechanism can operate successfully, what it verifies will not only be the investment return of a HK$600 million fund, but also a new type of regional sci-tech innovation relationship: shifting from competing for the same group of scientists and projects to jointly improving the success rate of scientific research achievement transformation.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Venture Capital Daily", Author: Ao Jin, Published with authorization from 36Kr.