2021 is a "big year" for equity investment. Relevant data show that the total scale of fundraising in the domestic equity investment market in the first three quarters of this year was nearly 1.3 trillion yuan, up 50% year-on-year. The total amount of funds raised by RMB and USD funds from January to September has exceeded the full year of 2020. At the same time, the total investment amount in the first three quarters exceeded 1 trillion yuan, up more than 70% year-on-year, and the growth rate was also rapid.
This year is also the second year of the COVID-19 outbreak, and the global technology field has undergone transformation and reshaping. Boosted by the epidemic, the cloud computing market has exceeded expectations and rushed to the "peak of concentration", while the technology outlet has shifted to the field of hard technology. Under the "double carbon" goal, business operations will face more unknowns. In the new round of innovation cycle, the market is looking for a new "value" consensus.
In 2021, Forbes China once again conducted an independent survey of venture capitalists active in the Chinese mainland market, selecting 100 investors who have achieved good results in the past five years from nearly 200 venture capital institutions. This year's judging results are still a reflection of the Matthew effect in China's venture capital market, and an interesting expression of the long tail effect of venture capital. Exit returns from 100 investors represent 80% of all candidates' total investment returns. This also shows from the side that in the past 5 years, there is a scarcity of projects that can withstand the test of market cycles and reflect long-term value.
This year, the average age of the venture capitalists on the list is 46 years old, showing a younger trend than last year. The Mesozoic generation, represented by Cao Yi, founding partner of Source Code Capital, Lian Meng, partner of IDG Capital, and Yue Bin, founding partner of Gaorong Capital, has become the backbone of the domestic venture capital industry. With a number of domestic biopharmaceutical companies such as Gan&Lee Pharmaceutical, Zaiding Pharmaceutical, CanSino, and Yiqiao Shenzhou successively landing on the capital market, Liang Zhenyu, the managing partner of Qiming Venture Capital, has jumped to the highest ranking female investor this year. But among the 100 people on the list, female investors are still in the minority.
Looking at the list of venture capitalists in the past few years, the trend of star projects concentrating on head institutions is still continuing. Among the 100 people on this year's list, nearly 40% are from 10 domestic leading venture capital institutions. Among them, Sequoia China has a total of 7 investors on the list, ranking first. On the other hand, the Yangtze River Delta, the Greater Bay Area and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region are still the first choice for investment of most of the listed institutions.
As established unicorns such as Kuaishou, Didi, and JD Logistics eventually rush to IPOs, tech start-ups such as PingCap that focus on key technologies and segments at the bottom are gradually becoming a new wave of darlings. Projects in hard science and technology fields such as semiconductors, intelligent manufacturing, new materials, and AI pharmaceuticals are increasingly sought after by the market. In the wave of digital and intelligent transformation and upgrading in all walks of life, a new era of entrepreneurship led by science and technology has arrived that conforms to China's national policy of self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology.
Nanpeng Shen is the founding and managing partner of Sequoia China
Today, Chinese entrepreneurs reflect an increasingly strong concentration of technology. From digital technologies such as cloud services, The Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, to medical fields such as AI pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, and brain-computer interfaces, to hard-core innovations such as chip semiconductors, new materials, and aerospace, including traditional fields such as transportation, consumption, and energy, more and more startups have a deeper technology background. This will bring many new changes to the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem, and will also prompt entrepreneurs and investors to have more new thinking and new practices on enterprise development and value creation.
Qin Liu is the founding partner of Wuyuan Capital
In the post-epidemic period, the volatility of the capital market will become more and more large, and the noise of investment will also become more and more noisy. Wuyuan will focus more on the changers of disruptive innovation. Changemakers are committed to changing the way a generation lives or changing the way an industry is produced. We can see that the increasingly confident cultural expression of contemporary young people is redefining the consumer industry, and we are also seeing exciting and major changes taking place in hard technology fields such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors, and life sciences.
At present, the entire market is entering the era dominated by science and technology from model innovation, and science and technology is influencing and shaping our industry, society and life for the first time in history, which also puts forward very high requirements for the knowledge and ability that entrepreneurs need to master. Successful entrepreneurs need to have the "dual core" characteristics of technology and business, a new generation of technology entrepreneurs, they have very strong technical ability, judgment of technology trends and technical evangelists, in the technology deeper, lower, more intersectional disciplines. At the same time, they also have very strong commercialization capabilities and collaboration capabilities, more open, more imaginative, more global collaboration. Wuyuan will continue to look for such "dual-core" entrepreneurs, identify those scarce minorities, those entrepreneurs who may have great controversy but have the ability to change the market landscape, support and accompany them, shape disruptive innovation and imagination for the future into reality, and create more value in this era.
Liang Zhenyu is the managing partner of Qiming Venture Capital
For the future investment direction, Liang Said he will continue to be optimistic about the development opportunities in the fields of new drug research and development, devices, diagnostics, and services. The growth of GDP, the favorable policies of the government, and the improvement of China's household income have become the "cornerstone" for people to pursue a higher quality of life, and the aging of the population and the incidence of diseases such as cancer and heart disease also require the development level and development speed of medical and health industry enterprises to match it. Qiming Ventures will continue to pay attention to investment opportunities in the fields of technology and consumption, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence applications in specific industries such as autonomous driving, industrial automation, as well as enterprise services and advanced manufacturing. The consumer industry will focus on new business, new social and community tracks, capturing new users, new technologies, new interaction methods, and new forms of content distribution. Liang Believes that in the future, China will have a large number of leading enterprises with global leadership positions to develop, and China's innovation and Chinese technology will no longer be the role of followers or imitators, but transcendents and leaders.
Zhen Zhang is the founding partner of Gao Rong Capital
In the next few years, we will continue to cultivate new consumption, new technologies, corporate services and healthcare to find and invest in innovative enterprises.
In the field of consumption, driven by the policy of common prosperity, the expansion of the middle-income population will bring about the improvement of the quality and expansion of consumption, coupled with the continuous change of the intergenerational characteristics of the Chinese mouth, and the supply chain advantages accumulated by China, which will continue to spawn excellent enterprises in the consumer field. In addition to the rise of local brands such as Perfect Diary and Yuanqi Forest, consumer brands and supply chains will also emerge in the global market. Today's barriers to consumer entrepreneurship are also getting higher and higher, testing whether they can be combined with digital technology to become the infrastructure of consumer technology.
We have always believed that technological innovation is an important driving force for the transformation of society and production methods. We hope to accompany enterprises in the field of new technologies to explore and experiment, and help technological innovation and bottleneck breakthroughs. In addition to investing in hard technologies such as chips and robots, it also focuses on the innovative application of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, carbon neutral and related technologies and how to create a better life for people.
In the current new stage of development, it is required that the industry supplement the chain and carry out transformation and upgrading, and the investment in the direction of enterprise services can be expected in the future. Gao Rong focuses on investment opportunities in the direction of new management practices, new technology architectures, and new value chains. For example, cloud native, as a new technology architecture for the future, will become a next-generation enterprise service infrastructure. Recently, with the opening of the Beijing Stock Exchange, it has aroused the attention of specialized and special new enterprises, which are the leaders in each subdivision of the industrial chain, and encourage the development of specialized and special new, with the purpose of nurturing new value chains and improving the modernization level of industrial chains.
The medical and health field is also in the stage of continuous emergence of scientific and technological innovation. Under the favorable factors of technological breakthroughs, demand upgrading, industrial chain innovation, and improvement of regulatory mechanisms, China's local medical innovation will usher in a period of great development in the next 10 years. When investing in healthcare, we focus on the combination of healthcare and technology, such as how AI can help drug discovery. In addition, we attach great importance to investment in innovative medical devices and diagnostics, innovative drugs and cutting-edge biotechnology, and have invested in dozens of innovative companies in the medical field in the past few years.
Kui Zhou is a partner at Sequoia China
As a provider of innovative financial services, we must serve entrepreneurs well, help innovative enterprises thrive, and take the road of harmonious development. Venture capital institutions are one of the most dynamic sources of power for the innovation economy, and need to create and contribute their own value to the overall progress of society.
Ni Zewang is the chairman of Shenzhen Venture Capital
Under the background of the end of the "barbaric growth" cycle and the arrival of the strict supervision cycle, under the national policy of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-improvement, the main investment line of "starting again to hard technology" is becoming clearer and clearer. For China's economic development trend, Ni Zewang's interpretation is: First, under the background of the opening of the Beijing Stock Exchange and the adherence to the tone of "housing and not speculation", China's equity investment will usher in a big era, residents' savings and real estate investment will continue to "move", support scientific and technological innovation through multi-level capital market, and form a benign interaction between science and technology- capital- and talents. Second, under the normalization of the epidemic, the global supply chain coordination is expected to continue, so we still need to focus on "supplementing the chain and extending the chain", strengthening scientific and technological innovation in the fields of information technology, intelligent manufacturing, new energy and new materials, and improving the resilience of the industrial chain to maintain China's industrial security. Third, under the background of the "double carbon" strategy and the "double control" of energy consumption, green investment directions such as wind and solar hydrogen energy, new energy vehicles and new power systems represented by energy storage will continue to receive attention.
Overall, Shenzhen Venture Capital will continue to closely follow the national strategy and continue to deepen the hard technology field that Shenzhen Venture Capital is good at.
Xu Xin, founder of Today Capital
The essence of venture capital is investment change. I think: the biggest change in the next 10 years is that algorithms will subvert many industries, from cross-border e-commerce to robots; from electric vehicles to autonomous driving; from product design to price positioning; from content marketing to private domain traffic of stores, algorithms have been infiltrated into all aspects of business operations. There are two kinds of future founders: those who understand algorithms and those who do not understand algorithms. Those who understand the new generation of founders who understand algorithms may form a dimensionality reduction blow for traditional founders. They know how to use algorithms and data to drive decision-making, all-round efficiency, they do not understand the supply chain, but the learning ability is super strong, and they can bear hardships and sleep in warehouses, and it is usually laymen who subvert the industry!
The challenge ahead is: there is a lot of hot money in the market, and very little long money! So today capital has created a 28-year evergreen fund! What we have to do is: find those tracks where the slope is very long and the snow is thick, the founder is very cattle, keep adding positions, holding for a long time, helping a new generation of founders, building great companies, and enjoying the compound interest of time!
Xiaojun Li is a partner at IDG Capital
This is an era full of opportunities, from artificial intelligence to the metacosm, from semiconductors to robotics, new directions are constantly emerging, which is also an era of rapid innovation.
As investors, we need to remain sensitive to new things, tap into more precise insights, understand the opportunities presented by technological and market changes, and have a deeper and clearer understanding of whether the products and services we focus on are differentiated innovations. We adhere to research-driven, believe in the power of science and technology, and help empower future enterprises to develop with high quality. At the same time, we must continue to hone a more effective, common values, long-term walk together of the fighting team, and with excellent entrepreneurs to become long-term partners, together with growth.
Always insist on getting the final verification, while accumulating experience, but also always break their own experience. Always pursue innovation, always keep progress.
Xu Dalai is the founding partner and CEO of Shun Capital
"2021 is still a challenging year, but it's also a year for startups to think hard and adjust their strategies and rhythms. Under the snow in the cold winter, there must be vitality. Startups that have once again survived the cold winter of 2021 capital will inevitably usher in a turnaround and development after making adjustments and reserves. ”
For the current economic and technological development and situation, I believe that the technological innovation promoted by hard technology and intelligent manufacturing, the efficiency change brought about by the enterprise service field, and the consumption wave brought about by brand outbreak and new consumption concepts are still the three driving forces leading the future development: the development of hard technology and intelligent manufacturing is the inevitable path to achieve domestic industrial upgrading. At the technical level, adhering to innovation in the field of science and technology and upgrading the domestic low-value-added manufacturing industry to high added value is a trend. At the talent level, many of the world's leaders in the field of artificial intelligence are Chinese or Chinese; domestic high-quality engineers are also achieving leapfrog growth. Excellent founding team is the foundation of enterprise development, so Shunwei is optimistic about the hard technology and intelligent manufacturing field under the dual innovation of technology and talent for a long time.
Regarding the enterprise service sector, in the current economic slowdown environment, excellent enterprises will actively seek self-change: the pursuit of higher efficiency, the maximum realization of cost reduction and efficiency, accompanied by this initiative will spawn huge opportunities in the field of enterprise services. As early as 2018, the Shunwei team began to lay out the large consumption field. At present, China has a fairly complete supply chain and a huge market, and the quality of the products produced has reached the world-class level. China's consumer brands are bound to have huge development opportunities to achieve a breakthrough.
Ying Wenlu, Chairman and Founding Partner of Yida Capital
The current industrial environment in China can be described as "three-phase superposition": the conversion period of import substitution, the acceleration period of industrial upgrading and the outbreak period of scientific and technological innovation. The changes in the domestic business environment, as well as the capital boost brought about by the successive launches of the ChiNext Board, the Science and Technology Innovation Board and the Beijing Stock Exchange, have also attracted more and more overseas talents and teams to return to China to start a business, and this siphon effect on talents has promoted China's scientific and technological innovation into an explosive period.
Note: The ranking refers to the exit quota of investors in the past five years, including the exit quota of the invested enterprises from 2016.10.15 to 2021.10.15, the exit quota after mergers and acquisitions, and the development status of the invested projects. The length of time that candidate investors have been involved in investment projects is also an important factor affecting the ranking. The earlier you enter the investment project, the more representative of the investor's judgment and vision.