The three co-founders of miHoYo have seen their total net worth surge by 100 billion yuan.

None of the three co-founders of miHoYo was left out this time.

On October 27, the "2026 Hurun China Rich List" was released. 39-year-old Cai Haoyu ranks 33rd on the rich list with assets of 128 billion yuan, marking a 47 billion yuan increase over the past year. Liu Wei, widely known as "Da Weige", ranks 76th with 70.5 billion yuan, followed closely by Luo Yuhao with 66.5 billion yuan. All three co-founders of miHoYo have made it to the list, while on the top 100 of the same list last year, only Cai Haoyu from miHoYo was included.

Meanwhile, Ding Lei from NetEase saw his wealth shrink by 45 billion yuan, ranking 8th with 275 billion yuan. The total wealth of the three founders who started their business in the dormitory of Shanghai Jiao Tong University is now only around 10 billion yuan less than that of this senior figure in the gaming industry.

The public tends to attribute this growth entirely to Genshin Impact. However, a look at miHoYo's other financial books reveals that this game company, which never lacks cash, has long been operating as an investor in the primary market.

Nearly 100 Billion Yuan Increase in Over a Year, All Three Founders Enter Top 100

On the 2025 Hurun China Rich List, Cai Haoyu had a net worth of 81 billion yuan, ranking 60th; Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao ranked outside the top 100 with net worth of 44.5 billion yuan and 42.5 billion yuan respectively. One year later, the total net worth of the three has risen from about 168 billion yuan to around 265 billion yuan, an increase of nearly 100 billion yuan. Among them, Liu Wei's ranking jumped 50 places to the 76th position.

The gap in the net worth of the three is roughly consistent with their equity structure. According to data from Tianyancha, Cai Haoyu is the actual controller, with a final beneficial shareholding of about 41%, while Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao hold approximately 22.6% and 21.4% respectively.

What is more notable is the timeline. In March this year, Hurun released the U40 Global Self-Made Rich List, with a cutoff date of January 15. On that list, Cai Haoyu's wealth was 84 billion yuan, Liu Wei's was 47 billion yuan, and Luo Yuhao's was 45 billion yuan. The evaluation cutoff for this latest rich list is September 1, which means most of the wealth growth of the three miHoYo co-founders took place in just these seven months.

However, miHoYo's gaming business has not been that smooth in recent periods.

miHoYo never releases its financial reports to the public, so the outside world can only estimate its general situation through third-party data. According to the 2025 annual overseas release ranking from Sensor Tower, miHoYo's ranking among Chinese mobile game publishers by overseas revenue dropped to 5th, after Tencent, Diandian Interactive, NetEase and Lemon Jam Technology.

According to data from Qimai, the estimated revenue of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail on iOS in the Chinese mainland decreased by 37% and 43% year-on-year respectively last year. The ACG track is getting increasingly crowded, with companies including Tencent, NetEase, Hypergryph and Perfect World launching new works to compete for the same group of players. miHoYo is also looking for new growth points. On July 4, Zenless Zone Zero was launched on Steam, bringing its core operating product to the world's largest PC gaming platform; the new space-themed life simulation game Star Homestead is scheduled for release this winter; and Varsapura, produced by Cai Haoyu himself, also released a gameplay demo.

What really caught the public's attention, however, is AI. miHoYo happened to expand its AI narrative at this time. In May this year, Liu Wei said at a technology sharing session that miHoYo's upper limit of investment in large models in the next three years is 1000 billion yuan, and he stated that "we will accept it even if we do not succeed in the end", a figure that is roughly higher than miHoYo's annual revenue.

Since then, AI has been almost unavoidable at every of his public appearances. At the campus recruitment presentation of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he said that miHoYo will become a pivotal member of the domestic large model team in the next two to three years. In the eyes of the public, miHoYo is no longer just an ACG game company that makes money from gacha mechanics, but an AI player with abundant cash, application scenarios and self-developed models. Judging from the change in valuation figures, the market is obviously willing to pay a premium for the latter identity.

In addition, MiniMax was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January this year, and miHoYo holds approximately 5.1% of the shares after the IPO. In March, the stock price peaked at a historical high of HK$1097, and the book market value of this position once approached HK$20 billion, which is a nice icing on the cake for its valuation growth.

miHoYo's "Casual Investments" Have Spawned Multiple IPOs

In early 2012, the three miHoYo co-founders started their business in the dormitory of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with a 100,000-yuan interest-free loan from Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center as startup capital, which was quickly exhausted. At the end of that year, Song Tao from Sky-mobi invested 1 million yuan and took 15% of the shares, helping these young people get through the hardest time.

In those years, Liu Wei led the team to roadshow everywhere, standing on the stage to explain to a room full of investors what ACG is and what a tech otaku is, with laughter coming from the audience from time to time. VCs collectively missed miHoYo, which later became an unavoidable regret in the career of many investors. Song Tao became one of the rare winners. On the 2024 Hurun Global Rich List, he was listed on the list together with the three miHoYo founders with a net worth of 24 billion yuan. 1 million yuan in exchange for more than 20 billion yuan, this is probably the angel investment with the most amazing return in China's gaming industry.

miHoYo has never raised a penny of financing since then. It is said that Tencent once asked someone to pass a message that miHoYo could set any terms as long as Tencent could take a stake, but miHoYo never agreed.

The company that was once snubbed by capital later sat in the position of an investor itself. Since around 2018, Honkai Impact 3rd and the subsequent Genshin Impact have supported its strong cash flow. There was a popular saying in the venture capital circle in those years that a game company in Shanghai holds billions of yuan in cash and is looking for wealth management opportunities all over the world.

According to incomplete statistics, miHoYo has directly invested in nearly 30 companies, with the most frequent moves in 2020 and 2021, making 8 investments each year. In addition, it has also acted as an LP, contributing to the funds managed by Tongge Venture Capital and Futeng Capital in 2022 and 2024 respectively, with shareholdings of about 11.4% and 9.8%. Through these funds, it has invested in CATL, a number of semiconductor companies such as Xinai Technology, Jinglue Semiconductor, Jinzhen Microelectronics and Quanxin Intelligent Manufacturing, as well as Zhenxu Biological in the biomedical field. Doing LP in addition to direct investment is not common among game companies.

Liu Wei has always downplayed this point. "I don't do investment, I do investment purely out of passion." At the sharing session of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he described those early investments as casual shots that he did not manage much after investing.

There are indeed many confusing projects on the list. In March 2021, miHoYo and Ruijin Hospital jointly built a joint laboratory for encephalopathy research. At the end of the same year, it co-founded the brain-computer interface company ZeroMind with Lü Baoliang, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Cai Haoyu's master's supervisor. For the nuclear fusion company Energy Singularity, according to Liu Wei, the team got two 100 million yuan investments from him with just two PPTs. There is also Orienspace, a private rocket company founded by Yao Song, a top student from Tsinghua University...

What really established miHoYo's position in the primary market is MiniMax.

At the end of 2021, Yan Junjie left SenseTime to start his own business. miHoYo, GL Ventures, IDG Capital and Yunqi Capital participated in the angel round. The four institutions invested a total of 31 million US dollars, with a pre-money valuation of 170 million US dollars. After that, miHoYo increased its investment in multiple rounds, Liu Wei served as a non-executive director, and miHoYo also became a customer of MiniMax, applying its model to NPC dialogue and plot generation in Honkai: Star Rail.

MiniMax's prospectus separately lists two "pilot senior independent investors", one is IDG Capital, and the other is miHoYo. On January 9 this year, MiniMax rang the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its stock price rose to HK$1330 in March. Calculated based on the angel round cost, miHoYo's book return once exceeded 100 times. Almost at the same time, Soul and Suplay successively submitted listing applications to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and miHoYo is the second largest institutional shareholder and the largest institutional shareholder of the two respectively. Within more than a month, the two invested companies successively submitted listing applications.

Looking back, miHoYo got the angel round ticket not by offering a higher price. The trust from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University alumni network, the implementable gaming scenarios, and the directly placed orders are exactly what financial VCs can hardly provide.

Starting to Reap Returns After Spreading the Net Widely

Before 2021, miHoYo's capital basically never left its own industrial ecosystem.

Figure maker Pai Culture once produced official figures for games such as Honkai Impact 3rd and Arknights, and miHoYo holds about 17% of its shares as the second largest shareholder. Cloud gaming provider Welink Technology launched Genshin Impact Cloud, with miHoYo holding about 6.3% of its shares. Gaming media Gcores, trendy toy card company Suplay, and puzzle game studio Mystery House are also on the list, among which Mystery House received two investments from miHoYo, which has become its largest shareholder.

When X.D. Network went public in Hong Kong in 2019, miHoYo, together with ByteDance, Lilith and Papergames, became cornerstone investors. These investments can basically be directly connected to games such as Genshin Impact and Honkai. An industry insider commented that "miHoYo is building a moat for its 'ACG empire'."

In 2021, Genshin Impact became a global hit, and the cash flow overflowed, making miHoYo's investments truly expand beyond the gaming industry to brain-computer interfaces, nuclear fusion, rockets and large models. This phase is described as "out of passion", but in essence it is more about investing in people.

Among them, Lü Baoliang from ZeroMind is Cai Haoyu's supervisor, Li Zhuyong, co-founder of Energy Singularity, is an associate researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Yan Junjie and Liu Wei are both based in Shanghai Caohejing and are said to have known each other for a long time. The project descriptions sound like imaginative ideas, but they are connected to a very specific social network behind them.

The harvest season has arrived, but the speed of miHoYo's investment has changed.

After Cai Haoyu stepped down as chairman in 2023, miHoYo's external investment slowed down significantly, with only one deal in both 2024 and 2025. This year, it has become active again, but the direction of investment has narrowed a lot.

In April, Guangzhou Weixiao Technology, founded by Li Kaiming, the former producer of Total War of Three Kingdoms, received investment from miHoYo, IDG Capital and 37 Interactive Entertainment, with a post-investment valuation of over 100 million US dollars. The team plans to develop single-player strategy games. Around the same time, Zhiming Network, founded by Xuanzi, the former producer of Beyond the World, also had miHoYo as an investor, developing a 2D story-driven otome game.

The moves in October were more frequent. On the 19th, Mingxin Qirui, a compute-in-memory chip company, announced the completion of a Series A financing of over 400 million yuan, with investors including Boyuan Capital, miHoYo and GigaDevice. The initiator of the company is Academician Liu Ming. A few days later, another compute-in-memory company, Jiutian Ruixin, also completed a new round of financing.

This company was founded in Shenzhen in 2018 by Liu Hongjie, a female engineering PhD. It completed three rounds of financing in a row this year, with Meituan Strategic Investment, XPeng Motors, YMTC Industrial Fund and Will Semiconductor entering one after another, and miHoYo Strategic Investment appeared in the latest round.

In the same week when it invested in chips, on October 22, miHoYo withdrew from ZeroMind, in which it held a 49% stake, ending the equity cooperation that started in 2021. Putting the two moves together, the net spread out of passion in the early years is being gradually reeled in, with capital converging towards the AI track.

After sorting this out, miHoYo's investment logic has not changed much, what has changed is its focus. In the early years, it protected its IP, then bet on young talents and cutting-edge technologies, and now everything is converging towards AI. Judging from current moves, the bulk of the 1000 billion yuan AI investment will still be allocated to self-development, and external investments are more to fill in links such as chips that it cannot develop on its own.

miHoYo is not the only game company that has tasted the sweetness in the primary market. 37 Interactive Entertainment has invested in three large model companies including Zhipu AI, and its investment income in the first quarter of this year surged 981% year-on-year, mainly from the fair value change after Zhipu AI's listing.

With abundant cash, ready-made application scenarios and real anxiety about AI, game companies are becoming an unavoidable industrial capital force in the large model and hard technology tracks. For many early-stage projects, getting investment from a large game factory often means getting their first big customer.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), written by Wang Tao, edited by Wuren, and authorized for release by 36Kr.