In the venture capital world, such a scene is not uncommon.
On February 9, Chenjing Technology completed tens of millions of dollars in A round of financing, investors include Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, IDG Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment, OPPO, etc., this round of financing will be mainly used for technology research and development, product landing and recruitment of outstanding talents.
The two-year-old company has a star-studded team behind it, with core members from Tsinghua Yaoban, MIT, Stanford and other famous schools, and has won a number of international medals. From experience, they are all from Google, Facebook, Baidu, DJI, Xiaoma Zhixing and other technology companies. For VC/PE, this is a standard founding team.
What is more "coincidental" is that the "spatial intelligence" focused on Chenjing Technology collided with the metacosm, a start-up in the field of spatial intelligence, which integrates a number of core technologies such as high-precision three-dimensional recognition and tracking, three-dimensional semantic segmentation and understanding, real-time positioning and map construction, edge computing, etc., to build a 3D meta-universe infrastructure with the earth 1:1 ratio, to achieve ultra-large-scale MMO games or social applications with the real world as a chessboard, and to empower core mobile terminals such as smart phones, smart glasses, and smart cars.
The reason why this is not uncommon is because investors have already plunged into the metaverse project pool and found companies that focus on the underlying technology of the metacosm. Chenjing Technology is not only facing competition with other start-ups, but also large factories.
01
This team, all the top backgrounds
This time, the protagonist of the story is called Chenjing Technology.
The reason why we can get the favor of capital must start from the founding team. Tianyan's investigation shows that the actual controller of Chenjing Technology is Hu Wen, who is also the founder and CEO.
Behind every successful enterprise, there must be a boss who is "extraordinary". Hu Wen studied chip design at the National University of Singapore and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master's degree. Due to the first major, it is also qualified as a doctoral guarantee from the University of California, Berkeley.
After graduation, Hu Wen began his career on Wall Street, where he worked in the capital markets of Listing, Mergers and Acquisitions and other capital markets in the top three investment banks in the United States, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Swiss Bank, and also served as the head of the high-tech team of ICBC International, the investment department of industrial and commercial bank of China, responsible for investment in artificial intelligence, big data, advanced manufacturing and other directions.
And his mind about entrepreneurship is even earlier. As early as more than a decade ago, when he was studying at MIT, Hu Wen met the world's first surgical robot - da Vinci robot, which integrates a number of top technologies, robotics, human-computer interaction technology and so on. "Such a product is exactly what China needs, and it will certainly benefit the Chinese", and the seeds of entrepreneurship were quietly planted in the heart at that time.
After returning to China, Hu Wen first served as CFO and deputy general manager of Liqun Automation. In just two months, the company became the first start-up robot company in China to receive an order from Apple, earning the first pot of gold. After that, Hu Wen served as co-ceo and CFO of Xiaoma Zhixing, a self-driving unicorn company.
Three years ago, a joke between Hu Wen and his friend Lei Jiabei once again ignited his entrepreneurial dream. "When you think about a good friend who works in a different place, can you put a blind box or treasure chest in his yard through some virtual mirroring software, he opens his mobile phone to go treasure hunting, and when he opens it, he finds that it is a surprise?" Although it is only a seemingly imaginative idea, Hu Wen also believes that the feasibility is great, in the 5G + AI + AR era, spatial intelligence will be the underlying support in multiple scenarios, and the future will fundamentally change people's lifestyles.
Therefore, on the last day of July 2019, Chenjing Technology was established. Hu Wen knows very well that the high technical barriers of the space intelligent track require the team to have a deep technical background. Therefore, the core team of Chenjing Technology is completely an all-star lineup: in addition to Hu Wen, Qi Zichao is the IOI 2009 gold medalist, the third in the world and the first in China. After being sent to Tsinghua Yao class, he won the silver medal and gold medal in the global finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition during his undergraduate period, and a master's degree from MIT; Chen Qifeng is the gold medalist of the International Informatics Competition and a doctor of computer vision at Stanford University; Regabei was an early member of Google X Lab and a member of the National Winter Camp of Informatics; Wu Yi was a silver medal in the International Informatics Competition, a doctor of artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, a yaoban undergraduate at Tsinghua University; Wu Yizi is the former core technology leader of Google Lens and an early member of Google X Lin Hengyi is a senior player in the field of intelligent hardware in China and a product consultant of many technology companies; Cao Tiantian is the former commercial director of Xiaoma Zhixing.
The founding team of more than 30 people are all from Google, Facebook, Baidu, DJI, Xiaoma Zhixing and other technology companies. Even Hu Wen himself could not help but praise, "Such a start-up team is not inferior to any driverless start-up company." However, not limited to unmanned driving, they are aiming at "5G + AI + AR", which is a wider field of imagination.
02
Crashing into the metacosm, capital also followed
According to the practice of the capital market, after the star team is assembled, the next step should be VC/PE.
Founded less than three years ago, the company received an angel round of investment from former partners of IDG Capital and a number of technology company founders at the beginning of the market, with a transaction amount of millions of dollars. On July 23, 2020, it once again received a multi-million dollar angel round of financing from Volcanic Stone Capital.
With the dual boost of talent and funds, Chenjing Technology also came up with good results, and soon cooperated with the Nansha District Government of Guangzhou to launch the City-level Mirror World MirrorVerse application, and launched two new application scenarios based on the platform. In this "world", players can not only choose the site for the "uninhabited island", but also cultivate fields, build houses, invite friends to visit the island, and so on. In the second application, it makes the virtual and real world seamless, and users can watch the live concert of the two-dimensional virtual idol in the real world, shoot at the virtual basketball court across the road, etc.
However, at this time, Hu Wen may not have expected that the day when investors "broke through the threshold" will soon come. At the beginning of its establishment, Chenjing Technology put forward the concept of spatial intelligence, but what can spatial intelligence do? Not many people know about it, and not many people pay attention to it.
In March 2021, Roblox, the first share of the metacosmonic concept, went public, and the metacosm concept became popular all the way. Chenjing Technology's ideas of Pegasus Starry Sky have aroused people's interest, and its vision of "integrating the virtual and real worlds and innovating the life experience" also coincides with the metaverse.
And so, an interesting scene happened.
After that, the capital circle of Chenjing Technology was visibly lively. After the financing, whether it is the number of institutions or the amount of financing, there has been a qualitative leap. In June 2021, Chenjing Technology completed the Pre-A round of financing, and the financing amount was directly upgraded to tens of millions of dollars. More abundant are investors, not only the old shareholder Volcanic Stone Capital, but also OPPO, Si Dao Capital, GAC Capital, SAIC California Venture Capital, Yuexiu Industry Fund, Fosun Ruizheng Capital, Sunwoda, etc.; this time, IDG Capital and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund also entered the bureau to lead its A round of financing, China's TOP3 listed game company enterprise Sanqi Interactive Entertainment and old shareholders OPPO, Si Dao Capital, BV Capital, Xinwanda Group, Fosun Ruizheng Capital co-investment, The transaction amount is tens of millions of dollars.
It is worth noting that the slogan of Chenjing Technology has also changed from the initial "entering the VR field" to "building a meta-universe infrastructure". Catching up with the huge outlet of the metaverse, the balance of victory tilted more. At present, Chenjing Technology is known as one of the pioneers in the field of domestic meta-universe industry, and has achieved many breakthroughs, such as the first technical team in China to form a city-level construction space cloud capability, the first city-level mirror world in China, and the first international initiative to build a meta-universe space intelligent operating system with completely independent intellectual property rights.
As Liu Yu, vice president of 37 Interactive Entertainment Investment, said, "The construction of the 'meta-universe' requires multiple technologies and many enterprises to build together, and we are optimistic about the development trend of AR/VR as the entrance-level terminal of the meta-universe and the next-generation computing platform." In the AR industry chain, spatial intelligence is an indispensable key technology. The story that Chenjing Technology has always told is "spatial intelligence".
It is understood that Chenjing Technology is about to launch the A+ round of financing, which can't help but make people look forward to it, and what kind of luxury lineup will it be?
03
The meta-universe mountain rain is coming, and infrastructure construction is the first step
The meta-universe fire has attracted an influx of VCs/PE. What is the ultimate form of the metaverse? It is too early to draw conclusions. However, the metacosm as a long-term outlet has basically become a consensus.
According to Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley, the meta-universe market will reach $8 trillion by 2024 and could become the next generation of social media, streaming and gaming platforms. How to profit on this day? The foundation of the meta-universe is the new digital infrastructure, and some investors told Rongzhong Finance that at present, the meta-universe project mainly looks at some of the underlying core technologies that promote the development of the meta-universe. It can be said that a wave of investment in meta-universe infrastructure is breaking out.
Chenjing Technology has won the favor of capital is this truth, and the spatial intelligence proposed by it is the integration of SLAM, three-dimensional reconstruction, AI, cloud computing, cloud rendering and other emerging technologies. In fact, there are not a few companies competing with them.
According to incomplete media statistics, from October 2021 to January 2022, the global investment in the meta-universe track exceeded 950 million US dollars, of which the largest amount of financing was obtained by meta-universe infrastructure enterprises, reaching 46%. Among them, 15 are above $10 million, with a total amount of $839 million, most of which have been invested in meta-universe platform development and meta-universe infrastructure technologies such as VR/AR.
On November 18, 2021, 3D vision technology company Mantis Vision hui announced the completion of a series A financing of 138 million yuan, led by SenseTime Guoxiang Capital (Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund), followed by Wenxing Shengshi and Putuoke, and continued to follow up with the original shareholder Mantis Vision. This round of financing funds will be mainly used for 3D technology software and hardware research and development, 3D studio landing and meta-universe content production.
On December 1, Wei Ling Times, a leading video cloud solution service provider in China, completed a 400 million yuan B round financing, with investors including Mingshi Capital, CDH Capital, Xiaomi Group, Mihayou and Shunwei Capital. WeiLing Times has independently developed innovative cloud computing architecture and key technologies such as audio and video real-time compilation code, application container technology, and GPU virtualization. The company was also established in 2019, but has completed 5 rounds of financing so far, with a cumulative transaction amount of nearly 800 million yuan.
On December 24, Beha Technology completed the A round of 10 million financing invested by Huiyin Group, the former focusing on building a meta-universe infrastructure and empowering Web3.0 social, consumption, e-commerce and other scenarios through advanced blockchain technology.
On January 18, 2022, Sencity announced the completion of a 10 million-level strategic financing by Jinmao Capital, HCH, SOS Ventures (SOSV) RMB Fund and Jianyuan Tianhua. Sencity is the world's leading enterprise in applying human interaction perception technology to the built environment of public space, mainly providing customers with virtual and real interaction modular technology and hardware configuration solutions and tools.
In addition, a number of large manufacturers such as Tencent, Huawei, Ali, and Baidu have already begun to explore. The big manufacturers have China's leading technology reserves in cloud computing, VR/AR, 5G, blockchain, etc., and also make up for shortcomings through investment and acquisition. For example, Tencent occupies a favorable position in the VR/AR ecosystem by investing in EpicGames, Snap, and Roblox; ByteDance has invested in and acquired a number of enterprises related to the meta-universe industry chain, invested in AI chip design company Shim Computing, GPU chip design unicorn Moore thread, and acquired Pico, a leading domestic VR manufacturer, for 9 billion yuan, which is a sensation in the venture capital circle.
Although some companies have rushed to use the heat of the metaverse to monetize, the development of the metacosm still has a long way to go. Behind this is inseparable from the gradual maturity and integration of various underlying technologies. At present, there are still many challenges that blockchain technology needs to overcome, such as energy consumption and VR to overcome the feeling of vertigo. Breaking through these challenges will it be possible for the metaverse to arrive.