China Tech Startup & Funding Brief — May 22, 2026
Chinese Tech Startup & Funding Morning Brief
05/22/2026, 08:13:45 AM@侯佳林

China Tech Startup & Funding Brief — May 22, 2026

State capital cements its role as anchor investor in Chinese AI: DeepSeek targets a $7B round at a ~$49B valuation as the National AI Fund moves to lead; Approaching.AI closes a Pre-A on AI Token infra; YuShiKongJian raises RMB 500M for its Starship-style reusable rocket; PixVerse crosses a $1B valuation on RMB 2.5B raised in six months; and Jiangbolang gets exchange approval for a RMB 3.7B AI memory chip secondary offering.

State capital is now openly co-piloting the AI boom. While the venture community's attention this week keeps gravitating toward headline foundation models, the more operationally useful signal is this: four distinct clusters — AI infrastructure, commercial space, financial data, and video generation — all closed or announced rounds within 48 hours of each other. Here's what moved.

Deals at a glance

CompanySectorRoundAmountLead investor(s)
Approaching.AI (趋境科技)AI Token infra (ATaaS)Pre-AHundreds of millions CNYXinglian Capital + Huakong Tech
YuShiKongJian (宇石空间)Commercial space / reusable rocketsSeries ARMB 500MGaorong Capital + Kunlun Capital
Zhizhong ZERONE (执中)Alternative asset AI dataSeries AUndisclosedXingxiang Capital
PixVerse / Aishi Tech (爱诗科技)AI video generationSeries C~RMB 300M (~$42M)CDH Investments
DeepSeek (first-ever external round)Foundation modelPre-IPOTarget CNY 50B (~$7B)National AI Fund (in negotiations)
Jiangbolang (江波龙)AI high-end memory chipsSecondary offeringUp to RMB 3.7BPublic market (SZSE approved)

Approaching.AI: the infrastructure bet VCs keep returning to

Approaching.AI (趋境科技), a Tsinghua-backed AI Token-as-a-Service startup, closed a Pre-A round in the "hundreds of millions of CNY" range. 1 Xinglian Capital and Huakong Technology co-led, with Gaorong Ventures (GL Ventures) following on. The company processes roughly one trillion tokens per day across enterprise clients including Kimi (Moonshot AI) and Zhipu GLM. 1
The round speaks to a specific gap in China's AI stack: demand for enterprise-grade inference that prioritizes latency predictability and structured output stability rather than raw model count.
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The team's pedigree is relevant: Approaching.AI is backed by Tsinghua University's High Performance Computing Institute, which contributed technology and took an equity stake via technology capitalization. Twenty-plus years of HPC research now underpins the company's TTFT (time to first token) and TPS (tokens per second) optimization work.

YuShiKongJian closes RMB 500M Series A — China's only chopstick-catch rocket company

YuShiKongJian (宇石空间) announced its Series A on May 18: RMB 500M led by Gaorong Capital and Kunlun Capital, with eight co-investors including mining giant Zijin Mining as a strategic industrial backer. 2 The company has now raised RMB 1B across five rounds since its founding in May 2024 — that's roughly one funding event every three months.
YuShiKongJian is the only Chinese commercial rocket company pursuing the full SpaceX Starship technology stack: stainless steel airframe + liquid oxygen-methane propulsion + "chopstick-arm" booster catch recovery. Its AS-1 rocket — 70 meters tall, 4.2-meter diameter, 570-tonne lift-off mass, 15.7-tonne one-way LEO capacity — was delivered in January 2026. The target: maiden flight H1 2027, commercial operations by H2 2027.
Three rockets are planned for production in 2026. Four milestone tasks this year: full-scale capture-arm ground test, first-stage static fire, and full-stack integration. 3
The investor rationale reflects constellation math. The Thousand Sails constellation and the GW constellation together plan over 20,000 satellites. ITU filing deadlines make the launch cadence non-negotiable. The Kunlun Capital lead investor's comment to Securities Times was direct: "The market needs high-capacity, low-cost, reusable liquid rockets. The technical direction has converged: LOX-methane + full-flow staged combustion + stainless steel + catch-arm recovery."
Night rocket launch at the pad, illuminated by spotlights
YuShiKongJian's AS-1 targets the same recovery architecture: stainless airframe, LOX-methane propulsion, chopstick-arm booster catch. 2

Zhizhong ZERONE closes Series A on alternative asset AI data

Zhizhong (执中 ZERONE), an alternative asset data and AI analytics platform, formally announced its Series A on May 21, led by Xingxiang Capital, with Caixin CICC and Puhong Capital co-investing. 4 Proceeds go to AI product development, data system upgrades, and market expansion. The company serves banks, insurers, and state-owned enterprises with standardized data on private equity, M&A, real estate, and credit assets — its tool is also used as the data layer by CLS (财联社) for VC and IPO prediction analytics.
The round is a narrower story than the others in this brief, but it points to a structural dynamic: as PE, VC, and alternative asset managers increasingly need machine-readable data for compliance and deal sourcing, the data-intelligence layer beneath the asset class is becoming a fundable product.

PixVerse / Aishi Tech: six months, RMB 2.5B, $1B valuation crossed

Aishi Tech (爱诗科技), the ByteDance alumni-founded video generation startup behind PixVerse, closed its Series C in March 2026: ~$42M (approximately RMB 300M), led by CDH Investments' Hong Kong Fund alongside CDH VGC and CDH Baifu. Co-investors include Yizhuang Guotou and Guotai Junan Innovation Investment. Post-money valuation crossed the $1B mark. 5
Over the six months to March 2026, founder Wang Changhu — previously a distinguished researcher at ByteDance's AI lab — raised a cumulative RMB 2.5B. The January 2026 strategic investment from China Ruyi was the other notable leg. Wang is now widely identified as the highest-funded AI founder from the ByteDance alumni cohort. 6
PixVerse's differentiation is model architecture: in January 2026 it launched PixVerse R1, described as the first general-purpose real-time world model. Two months later, PixVerse C1 targeted the film and TV production segment. The 2.5B in six months was not passive capital accumulation; it funded competing with Kling (Kuaishou), Wan (Alibaba), and Sora-equivalent products in a vertical where distribution moats are still being built.

State capital is now openly leading foundation model rounds

The clearest strategic signal from this week's news cycle is the decisive pivot of Chinese state capital from secondary support toward lead-investor status in foundation models. China Daily Asia reported that Beijing's AI Industry Investment Fund, Shanghai Guosheng Group's fund, and China Mobile are all now confirmed investors in Moonshot AI, which has raised over $3.9B since the start of 2026. 7
DeepSeek's first-ever external round remains the headliner. The company is targeting over CNY 50B (~$7B), which at the expected valuation above CNY 350B (~$49B) would make it the largest single primary funding round in Chinese tech history. 7 The National AI Fund (国家人工智能产业投资基金, the MOF-anchored "AI Big Fund") is the reported lead candidate.
The pattern: national-level capital vehicles — not traditional VC — now set the anchor price in foundation model rounds. That compresses the negotiating window for pure financial investors and adjusts the implicit exit timeline, since state capital tends to prioritize strategic goals over quick IPO rotation.
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Jiangbolang: the chip play happening in public markets

Jiangbolang (江波龙), a NAND flash and DRAM storage chip company listed on the Shenzhen ChiNext board, had its RMB 3.7B secondary offering approved by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on May 20. 8 The proceeds target AI-oriented high-end memory chip R&D, semiconductor storage controller chip development, and advanced packaging infrastructure.
This isn't a VC deal, but it belongs in this brief as a capital market data point: it's the first deal cleared under Shenzhen Stock Exchange's new "asset-light / high R&D intensity" re-financing standard, which was extended from ChiNext to the main board in March 2026. Jiangbolang's revenue grew from RMB 8.3B at IPO to RMB 22.8B in 2025 — a 2.7x increase — while keeping capex-to-R&D intensity at 12.8% physical asset formation. In AI memory, domestic alternatives to Samsung and SK Hynix are attracting the same capital enthusiasm as the foundation models.

Sector patterns: where capital is converging

Three themes cut across this week's deals:
AI infrastructure over applications. The Approaching.AI Pre-A is the third AI infra round in two weeks that's not a foundation model or a vertical app. The narrative has shifted: capital now chases the compute and serving layer, not just the model layer.
Commercial space as capital-adjacent to AI. YuShiKongJian's Zijin Mining investment reads as strategic more than financial — mining companies with satellite monitoring needs are beginning to seed the launches that will image their own assets. Commercial space and the AI data economy are converging at the ground station.
The ZJU alumni pipeline. A less-reported theme visible in 36Kr's broader May coverage: Zhejiang University alumni are generating a funding wave that rivals the Tsinghua and PKU networks. Qianxun Intelligence (前沿智能), Xinghaitu (星海图), and DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng are all ZJU products. 9 12 ZJU-affiliated investment institutions have collectively deployed CNY 12B+ into more than 430 alumni startups. That's an institutional alumni network mature enough to pre-seed, lead, and follow-on within the same company over multiple rounds.

What to watch next

  • DeepSeek's official round close: once the National AI Fund anchor is confirmed, the CNY 350B valuation becomes the new baseline for Chinese foundation model comps — affecting how investors price Baichuan AI, Zhipu, and others.
  • YuShiKongJian first-stage static fire: H2 2026 is the target. That milestone (or a slip) will be the real stress test on the RMB 1B raised in 15 months.
  • PixVerse vs. Kling market share: now that both have crossed $1B valuation and each has product on market, user retention and enterprise contract wins matter more than the next funding round.
  • Approaching.AI customer concentration: two named anchor clients (Kimi, Zhipu GLM) covering ~1T tokens/day is a strong proof point, but narrow. Follow-on commercial announcements will indicate whether ATaaS is a platform or a dedicated service contract.
Sources: 36Kr, China Daily Asia, Xinmin Evening News (Shobserver), Securities Times (STCN), Sina Finance, IT Home, bianews. All amounts in Chinese yuan (CNY) unless otherwise noted. USD conversions approximate at 7.2 CNY/USD.

References

  1. 1Approaching.AI Pre-A round coverage — Xinmin Evening News
  2. 2宇石空间完成5亿元A轮融资 — 证券时报 / 新京报
  3. 3宇石空间Series A detail coverage — IT之家
  4. 4执中完成A轮融资 — 36Kr
  5. 5PixVerse系列C轮融资 — 36Kr
  6. 6爱诗科技融资报道 — bianews
  7. 7State-backed investors eye top AI startups — China Daily Asia
  8. 8江波龙再融资获批 — 证券时报
  9. 9浙大系创业公司融资浪潮 — 36Kr

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