By Cheng Manqi and Pei Yutong
As money pours into China’s hottest technology sectors, many investors are asking when the bubble will burst.
Wang Xinyu, a partner at DragonBall Capital (Longzhu Capital), the venture capital and industrial investment arm of Chinese tech giant Meituan (3690.HK), sees things differently.
In embodied AI — the fast-growing field that combines artificial intelligence with physical robots — China is not investing too much, he argues. It is investing too little.
That conviction has helped make the broader Meituan group the largest external shareholder in robot maker Unitree Robotics, one of China’s most closely watched technology companies. Through a combination of strategic investments and DragonBall funds, Meituan has invested more than 400 million yuan ($56 million) in the company.
DragonBall has also become an early backer of Moonshot AI, the startup behind the Kimi large language model, investing across multiple rounds after identifying founder Yang Zhilin before the company even existed.
A light in his eyes
Looking across these investments, Wang sees a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs emerging.
“They are not starting companies because they want to make money,” he says. “They are starting companies because they genuinely love what they are building.”
Wang first met Unitree founder Wang Xingxing in 2016, when both men were just starting their careers. Wang Xingxing had recently graduated and was building robotic dogs long before the category attracted widespread attention.
What stood out was not the business plan but the founder’s passion.
“There was a light in his eyes,” Wang recalls.
Yet DragonBall did not invest for years. Wang remained uncertain about whether robots would find practical applications and whether advances in AI would make them useful enough to succeed commercially.
His view changed in late 2023 after visiting leading robotics laboratories in the U.S. He found Unitree robots widely used by researchers and saw strong demand for the company’s newly launched humanoid robot.
Judge technology by its usefulness
The experience convinced him that if top researchers around the world were building on Unitree’s hardware, the software and AI capabilities would eventually catch up.
DragonBall invested soon afterwards and has continued increasing its stake.
The firm’s broader bet on embodied AI extends beyond Unitree. It has backed companies working on robot manipulation, robotics chips and consumer robotics products.
Wang dismisses many of the industry’s technical arguments over training data and model architectures. In emerging industries, he says, it is often impossible to know in advance which approach will win. The important question is whether the technology is becoming genuinely useful.
That optimism contrasts with growing concerns that China’s embodied AI sector is overheating. More than 50 Chinese companies in the field are already valued at over 10 billion yuan.
Wang argues that China’s investment levels still trail the scale of spending seen in the U.S. The goal, he says, is no longer to produce cheaper alternatives but to create technologies that outperform global competitors.
Young big brothers
DragonBall’s enthusiasm for ambitious founders extends beyond robotics.
Shortly after ChatGPT’s launch, the firm began pursuing Yang Zhilin, then a prominent AI researcher who had not yet founded Moonshot AI. When Wang finally met him in 2023, he found not only a strong technologist but also someone with a clear vision for building a major AI company.
The encounter reinforced a pattern Wang had started noticing among many of China’s most promising entrepreneurs.
He calls them “young big brothers” — founders who may be young in age but have spent years obsessively focused on a single field. Their expertise comes from deep commitment rather than seniority.
Many belong to a generation that grew up during China’s economic boom and entered the technology industry just as companies such as ByteDance were expanding rapidly. Wang believes that experience has given them unusual confidence and ambition.
For him, the most important change in China’s technology sector is not technological but cultural.
Founders such as Wang Xingxing and DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng are building companies not because they spotted a market opportunity, he says, but because they became obsessed with solving a problem.
“The future has already arrived,” Wang says. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”
Only a small fraction of people worldwide have paid for advanced AI products, he notes, suggesting the technology’s impact is still in its early stages. He expects the pace of change over the next three years to exceed that of the last three.
For investors, the challenge is no longer deciding whether AI will transform society. It is identifying the founders capable of shaping that transformation.
Source:
LatePost
