Surging 240% at opening, Changzhou sees the IPO of a new 20-billion-yuan unicorn.

Just today, Gaoke Technology rang the listing bell.

This professor-led project, which started in Jilin Province and took root in Changzhou, has finally stepped onto the stage of the capital market.

As of press time, Gaoke Technology's share price rose 240% at opening, with a market value exceeding 25 billion yuan so far.

The story behind the sharp rise at opening is a 13-year technological journey that has finally reached its harvest period, and also a story that Changzhou, a key manufacturing city in Jiangsu, has nurtured another unicorn enterprise.

From the Lecture Hall of Jilin University to the Factory Building in Changzhou

Let's go back to 2013. At that time, Liu Jianfang was 38 years old, a professor and doctoral supervisor at Jilin University, and had been standing on the lecture platform for many years. But that year, he made a seemingly risky decision: to leave the familiar campus with several graduate students, and turn his 20 years of accumulated piezoelectric drive technology into a real formal company.

The research on piezoelectric drive technology at Jilin University can be traced back to the direction pioneered by Professor Yang Zhigang, Liu's mentor, in 1992.

Liu Jianfang was admitted to Jilin University to pursue his doctoral degree in 2002. Following this research line, he devoted himself to two niche fields that were barely noticed in China at that time: piezoelectric precision drive and precision fluid control.

During his doctoral study, he even made a special one-year academic visit to Yamagata University in Japan, following Katsumi Watanabe, an expert in mechanical mechanism, and Katsuyoshi Suzuki, an expert in vibration analysis and control, to systematically learn the cutting-edge methods of piezoelectric drive and control. In 2005, he obtained his doctor of engineering degree, stayed at Jilin University to teach, and was promoted all the way from lecturer to associate professor and then professor. During this period, he also led the team to undertake a number of national Class A scientific research projects.

Choosing to leave academia and start a business was absolutely a minority choice in Jilin at that time.

At that time, the market atmosphere for the transformation of knowledge achievements was not strong. Professors in universities preferred to stay on campus and keep a stable and decent job.

It was the decision made in 2013 that truly "moved" the technology out of the laboratory.

In this year, Liu Jianfang, together with several parties including Mingsai Zhixin, Bai Junjie, and Zhibang Technology, jointly contributed capital to register a company in Wujin, Changzhou, which was the predecessor of Gaoke Technology.

The startup capital was only 2 million yuan. In the precision manufacturing industry with heavy assets and long cycles, this amount of money can be regarded as "starting from scratch".

In fact, choosing the direction of precision fluid control was not a popular choice. At that time, piezoelectric jet dispensing technology and products were almost monopolized by foreign brands, the domestic market was blank, and even the industry standards were set by others. But what Liu Jianfang valued was exactly this blank market: no one was doing it, so there was an opportunity to be the first.

The days in the early stage of entrepreneurship were not easy.

Liu Jianfang later admitted in an industry exchange that when the team came out of the university, they were completely "newbies" with no experience in enterprise management and were not good at handling business relations. Moreover, starting a business in Changzhou meant that they could not compete with first-tier cities in attracting talents, so it took more effort to recruit and retain employees than in other places.

But this team of teachers and students had their own way: not following the trend, relying on solid technical foundation and differentiated products, to gain a firm foothold little by little in the fiercely competitive market.

The piezoelectric jet dispensing technology itself has a very high threshold, requiring interdisciplinary research of materials, mechanics and control — the electronic control technology of piezoelectric ceramics, preload packaging, charge and discharge control, temperature control, as well as difficult problems such as high-frequency fatigue of mechanical structures, each of which is a hard nut to crack.

After the team overcame these technical difficulties, they took the lead in launching the domestic self-developed piezoelectric jet solution in China, realizing the mass production of dispensing operations, which not only extended the service life, but also reduced the cost. After repeated verification, they raised the industry's jet life standard from the original level to 1 billion times. This figure was later followed and adopted by peers, and became the new industry benchmark.

The company also quietly completed a transformation in this process.

From the initial small dispensing and packaging workshop with "single product and single industry", it gradually expanded to fields such as precision glue coating for new energy and fluid control for semiconductor equipment, and has grown into a technology platform enterprise covering three core series: flow control, dispensing and packaging, and precision glue coating.

The Report Card Handed in Thirteen Years Later

Numbers best illustrate how fast this long journey has gone.

The prospectus shows that from 2022 to 2024, the operating revenue of Gaoke Technology was 165 million yuan, 226 million yuan and 423 million yuan respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of over 60%; in the first half of 2025, the revenue reached 242 million yuan. The curve of attributable net profit is steeper — it rose from 15.3972 million yuan in 2022 to 99.7604 million yuan in 2024, with a year-on-year increase of 276.6%, and reached 54.4191 million yuan in the first half of 2025.

What supports this growth curve is several solid technological breakthroughs.

In 2021, Gaoke independently developed the first domestic semiconductor-grade piezoelectric MFC (Mass Flow Controller), breaking the long-term monopoly of overseas manufacturers such as Horiba, MKS and Brooks in the domestic semiconductor etching and deposition equipment market. Under the background of uncertain semiconductor equipment export restrictions among China, the United States, Japan and the Netherlands, such domestic substitution capability is particularly critical.

At present, some models of the company's flow control products have been mass used in front-end equipment for 7nm and below logic chips, which can adapt to 5nm etchers, covering core wafer manufacturing processes such as etching, thin film deposition, cleaning and ion implantation.

The customer list also reflects the market recognition: consumer electronics giants such as Luxshare, Foxconn, AAC Technologies and GoerTek are long-term partners, whose products cover the industrial chains of Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi; CATL, BYD and JinkoSolar have brought it into the power battery and photovoltaic tracks, and the company is also expanding new fields such as automotive body-in-white.

The capital market sensed the opportunity very early.

In 2016, Gaoke Technology completed its first round of financing, with Yuan Venture Capital placing a bet on its angel round.

After that, leading industrial automation firm Inovance Industrial Investment, Shenzhen industrial capital Zhengdao Investment, as well as top investors such as Walden International and SMIC PE have successively invested in the company.

Among them, the most notable investment is Xinhui Venture Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Changzhou Investment Group Co., Ltd.

Behind this fund is the support and assistance of Changzhou to local enterprises.

Wujin, Changzhou:

A Soil That Continuously Breeds Unicorns

Gaoke's headquarters is still located in the Gaoke Building in the Science and Education Town of Wujin District, Changzhou, not far from its first factory when it started the business. This is not accidental, but something Changzhou has been doing for years: retaining technology entrepreneurs and accompanying them through the whole journey of growth.

From the perspective of the whole Jiangsu Province, the output efficiency of this region is quite amazing.

In 2025, Jiangsu led the national capital market with 46 listed enterprises, far exceeding the number of Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces. In the same year, the total number of potential unicorn enterprises in Jiangsu exceeded 200 for the first time, making it the only province in China that crossed this threshold, and the number of newly added potential unicorns also ranked first in the country.

Although Changzhou's economic volume is less than that of Suzhou and Nanjing, it still has a place on the unicorn list — in 2025, 8 Changzhou-based enterprises were selected as unicorn enterprises, 7 of which are from the new energy track, and the 2 newly added unicorns are both from Liyang; Changzhou has 13 potential unicorn enterprises, ranking 12th among all cities in China. Behind these figures, a complete set of industrial cultivation logic from "seedlings" to "towering trees" is playing its role.

Wujin National High-tech Zone is the most fertile part of this soil. This park covers an area of about 64 square kilometers, gathers more than 10,000 enterprises, and has nurtured hundreds of unicorns, potential unicorns and gazelle enterprises in total.

Back to 2013, the year Gaoke Technology was founded, it was the talent project introduced by the fifth batch of "Longcheng Talent Program" in Wujin District that enabled Gaoke to obtain 2 million yuan of government support funds.

The official website of Wujin District shows that in recent years, the district has introduced a total of 1748 leading entrepreneurial talent projects, more than 500 talent projects at the provincial level and above, successfully incubated 5 listed enterprises, 9 enterprises listed on the New Third Board, and 43 enterprises selected into the Longteng Plan's pre-listing reserve library. Gaoke Technology's STAR Market IPO approval is not only the result of the enterprise's long-term R&D investment and technology accumulation, but also a concrete proof of Wujin's continuous efforts to create an environment that "retains talents with full care" and turns talent projects into industrial increments.

In recent years, Wujin has launched the city's first demonstration zone of "power supply upon request", and also introduced the first policy in the province that the government and power enterprises jointly bear the access costs outside the red line of projects, which is specially designed to reduce costs and save time for major projects.

These seemingly inconspicuous details are often the most practical pain points for precision manufacturing enterprises when expanding production.

At the Changzhou municipal level, a cultivation mechanism for pre-listing enterprises called the "835 Project" is also operating simultaneously: there are more than 800 enterprises in the library, 300 share reform enterprises are supplemented on a rolling basis, and the number of enterprises under counseling and filing remains at about 50 all year round. Cooperating with the "1+1+6" service system (one work linkage mechanism, one capital market element platform, plus six key projects of warehousing cultivation, compliance strengthening, capital empowerment, talent cultivation, cooperation linkage, and enterprise optimization), it breaks down departmental barriers, ensuring that enterprises are accompanied through the whole process from entering the cultivation library to finally striking the listing bell.

In the "Several Policies to Further Support the Innovative Development of Enterprises" issued by the Changzhou Municipal Government, for technical transformation projects with equipment and software investment exceeding 100 million yuan, a maximum of 10% of the total investment will be given as special fund support, with a maximum of 10 million yuan for a single project; for projects in the "five basic fields" including basic components and basic materials, the maximum support ratio can reach 15% — precision manufacturing enterprises are often the most direct beneficiaries of these substantial supports.

From the 2 million yuan startup capital in 2013 to the moment of ringing the bell on the STAR Market in 2026, Liu Jianfang and his team have spent 13 years.

During these 13 years, Changzhou has also grown simultaneously. Relying on a solid industrial cultivation system, it has turned one after another technology-oriented enterprises like Gaoke from an idea in the laboratory to the stage of the capital market step by step.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), Author: A Bu, Editor: Wu Ren, Published with authorization from 36Kr.