You would feel too embarrassed to mention your financing if the total amount is less than 100 million yuan.

Over the past period, due to my work on initial financing, I have been in close contact with a large number of projects, and the most intuitive impact on me is that the "ceiling" of early-stage projects is getting higher and higher.

Take the angel round as an example. A few years ago, it was normal for enterprises to raise hundreds of thousands to millions of yuan in angel rounds, and hard-tech projects that could get tens of millions of yuan were already regarded as "super angel rounds". Nowadays, teams with strong backgrounds in popular tracks basically start their angel rounds at the 100-million-yuan level, and top teams can even obtain more than 1 billion yuan. The record of the "largest angel round" is constantly being refreshed.

In just the past three months, three angel rounds worth over 1 billion yuan have been born:

In July, Moqi Intelligence, co-founded by Huang Qingqiu, a former Huawei "Genius Youth", announced the completion of a series of angel round financings with a total amount of over 1 billion yuan, and its post-money valuation exceeded 7 billion yuan;

In August, Pragmatic Technology, founded by Lin Junyang, the former core head of Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen, completed a $220 million financing with no products and no revenue just 3 months after its establishment, with a post-money valuation of about $2 billion;

In October, AI agent enterprise Huilian Intelligent Technology completed another angel round financing of over $200 million.

The overall rise of the "water level" of early-stage financing has also changed the publicity threshold of the industry. A PR friend once complained to me: "Now if a project's financing does not exceed 100 million yuan, people are too embarrassed to make a public announcement."

Of course, the "jump" in financing amount and valuation is only the surface. The more common consensus in exchanges is that the financing logic of early-stage projects in the past two years has been reconstructed, and many of the changes are even "unprecedented".

Due diligence for top-tier projects has become a "luxury"

In May this year, my colleague Teacher Zhang Nan wrote an article mentioning that some star projects directly launch two or even three rounds of financing at the same time when raising funds. Recently, this phenomenon has become increasingly common.

J, founding partner of a dual-currency fund, told me that several early-stage projects he contacted recently required him to invest the money in two rounds at different valuations, otherwise he could not get any share of a single round. "I have been in the industry for more than 20 years, and I have never encountered such a situation." J sighed.

Another VC investor A also revealed that when he was competing for the early share of an optical interconnection company, he was not only required to subscribe for the next round, but also emphasized that he must act as the lead investor.

FA practitioners may have a stronger perception. Cao Jishan, founding partner of YunDao Capital, said that "promoting two rounds in parallel" has now become the standard operation for top-tier projects. "Now many star projects will not wait for the previous round to be fully closed before directly launching the next round of financing. For an embodied intelligence project we contacted, the SPA of the previous round was just signed and the industrial and commercial change has not been submitted, but more than a dozen TSs for the next round have already been received. There are even cases in the industry where 'the money of the previous round has not arrived, but the next round of financing has already been officially announced', which completely breaks the default rule of 'starting the next round after the previous round is fully closed' in the past."

The popularization of "two parallel rounds" in top-tier projects has also promoted the overall acceleration of the financing rhythm itself. Especially in the first half of this year, in popular hard-tech tracks such as embodied intelligence, AI, commercial aerospace, controllable nuclear fusion, and quantum computing, the financing rhythm of top-tier projects has been directly compressed from more than half a year in the past to monthly or weekly calculation, and some extreme cases are even advancing on a daily or weekly basis.

Cao Jishan revealed that among the projects he participated in, there has been a situation where "the second round of talks is scheduled on the day of the first contact, the second round directly enters due diligence, and the third round negotiates the SPA terms and process". "In the past, investors needed 3 months to complete the whole chain of project initiation, due diligence and investment decision-making, but now the whole process has to be completed in 1-2 weeks. If you hesitate a little, the project share may not be locked."

With the financing rhythm compressed so much, the "due diligence" link is the first to be sacrificed.

The version I heard is that many star projects have not opened in-depth due diligence now, and only provide a standardized third-party report and interview records of the core team. Some founders even set clear terms: no performance bet, no repurchase, no in-depth due diligence, and whoever's money arrives first gets the share. In more extreme cases, institutions that want to lock in investment shares need to prepay investment deposits. Many follow-on investors have no room for independent due diligence at all, and can only directly reuse the reports of lead investors.

To a certain extent, the current decision-making problem of institutions has changed from "whether to invest" to "whether to get a share" — if you make a move one week later, not only will the quota be completely gone, but the valuation of the next round may even double directly.

Lingxin Qiaoshou is a typical example. Last May, I wrote an article about dexterous hands ("The 'Last Centimeter' of Robots Is On Fire"). At that time, Lingxin Qiaoshou had just completed a seed round with a valuation of 400 million yuan, and the new round of valuation was called to 800 million yuan, which many investors had already described as "crazy". But as we all know, in just over a year, the target valuation of its new round of financing is said to have rushed straight to 6 billion US dollars (about 40 billion yuan).

"Frankly speaking, in the actual transaction process now, the sense of accelerated rhythm is very strong, and many past industry common senses have completely failed." Cao Jishan said.

Pricing according to the final scenario from the very first day

In fact, whether it is the rise of financing amount and valuation, the popularization of "promoting two rounds in parallel", or the acceleration of financing rhythm, they all point to the same thing: the pricing logic of early-stage investment has been reconstructed, which is the result of the combined effect of multiple factors behind it.

In the past few years, 70% of the capital in the primary market has come from state-owned assets, which means that the choice of the "national team" basically determines the flow and preference of the vast majority of capital in the market. For this reason, a consensus has gradually formed in the VC/PE circle: to invest in accordance with the government work report.

Now if you ask any early-stage investor what tracks they are paying attention to, the answers are no more than embodied intelligence, low-altitude economy, commercial aerospace, brain-computer interface, controllable nuclear fusion... All of these fall into the category of emerging industries and future industries in the "15th Five-Year Plan".

As the certainty of the track increases, the investment logic of GP naturally changes accordingly. At present, the capital parties participating in early-stage investment mainly include three categories: market-oriented VC, state-owned institutions and industrial capital. Although different capital attributes determine their different decision-making criteria, the collective FOMO of market-oriented VCs that "would rather make a wrong investment than miss it", the industrial capital seeking strategic positioning through strengthening and supplementing the industrial chain, and the pursuit of "security narrative" by state-owned institutions, all make them converge to the top projects in the track, and even willing to pay a premium. At the same time, the industry's valuation and pricing standards for these projects have also shifted.

"Two years ago, when we priced angel round hard-tech projects, we had a very clear, almost uncontroversial standardized system, the core of which was designed around the 'certainty already in hand'. Now when we price top projects in top tracks such as AI and embodied intelligence, the traditional fundamental anchor points have completely failed. The core pricing logic has become directly benchmarking the final scenario valuation of the track's final pattern, and then back-calculating the option value of the angel round." Cao Jishan said.

He took team screening as an example: now we are not looking at the small past achievements of the team, but whether the team can support the ceiling of "the next generation platform-level company in the track". For example, if the core team is a global top scientist in the field of large models and humanoid robots, or an engineering leader who has led a product worth tens of billions of dollars, even if the company has just been registered and the product has not been developed at all, the valuation can directly jump to 2 billion to 5 billion yuan, which is equivalent to the valuation of projects in the Series A stage in the past.

"This is essentially a paradigm shift in the primary market: in the past, the angel round was 'using small money to try and error, and pricing in stages according to milestones'. Now the early-stage projects in popular tracks are priced according to the final scenario from the first day, giving sufficient capital directly to allow the project to skip the verification period and lock the position before the giants enter the market." Cao Jishan said.

"Ordinary projects and top-tier projects are completely two different worlds"

It needs to be emphasized that the many phenomena described above and the changes in the decision-making logic of investment institutions are all discussed around the top projects in popular tracks, not the general trend of the whole industry.

This can actually be seen from the data. According to CVSource data from Zero2IPO, in the third quarter of 2026, there were 974 domestic early-stage investment events, with the total disclosed investment amount of about 60.825 billion yuan, and the average single financing amount was 62.4492 million yuan. But it is worth noting that the median single financing in Q3 was only 20 million yuan.

That is to say, the average value of over 60 million yuan is the result of being averaged by large-scale financing, and more early-stage projects still get less than 20 million yuan.

In addition, from the perspective of capital distribution, the entire market has now shown an extreme situation of "large at both ends and small in the middle": the early seed round, angel round and Pre-A round are crowded with state-owned assets, market-oriented VCs and industrial capital, while the Pre-IPO stage is supported by large industrial funds and national-level funds. On the contrary, the growth stage and Series B/C rounds where capital was most concentrated in the past have seen an obvious capital gap due to the large number of exits of traditional private VCs.

This undoubtedly aggravates the survival difficulty of ordinary projects that are already short of capital — it is easy to encounter the problem of financing interruption during the growth period.

However, according to Cao Jishan of YunDao Capital, with the gradual release of the bubble, the extreme pricing logic of the "final scenario option" for top-tier projects has begun to adjust recently, and the pricing anchor point is moving towards an intermediate state. "In the current market, there have already been flat round cases where the angel round valuation is 2 billion yuan, but Series A investors are only willing to offer 1.8 billion yuan. Once the proportion of flat rounds and price-cut rounds in the whole market's Series A financing exceeds 30%, it means that the upward momentum of the valuation of early-stage projects has been completely exhausted, and the high valuation logic will be broken."

At the same time, he mentioned that the performance of top companies in various tracks in the secondary market after their future listing, and the adjustment of state-owned LP's "fault tolerance space" for early-stage projects will also affect the subsequent evolution of this logic.

At present, the market is looking for a new balance between popularity and risk control. For investment institutions, the real test may no longer be just whether they can get a share of a certain round of popular projects, but whether they still have a verifiable decision-making framework when the pricing anchor point swings back.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zero2IPO", author: Wang Manhua, published with authorization from 36Kr.