Yuanhe Houwang: Welcoming a Year of IPOs

This year’s heavyweight IPOs have emerged.

Not long ago, Shenghe Jingwei Semiconductor Co., Ltd. (referred to as “Shenghe Jingwei”) successfully passed the review by the Shanghai Stock Exchange Listing Committee, becoming the first Sci-Tech Innovation Board IPO project in the Year of the Horse. This was once a highly competitive project in the venture capital circle, attracting numerous VC/PE firms.

One face left a deep impression—Yuanhe Houwang. Since 2021, Yuanhe Houwang has invested a total of 1.2 billion yuan in Shenghe Jingwei. Continuous heavy holdings finally led to a moment of payoff.

This is just a glimpse. Over the past few years, Yuanhe Houwang has reaped multiple mega IPOs—Anlu Technology, Rongbai Technology, JD Logistics, SenseTime, Jitu Express, Yitang Shares, Hengkun New Materials… and several more IPOs are on the way. The team’s most lasting impression is: a lean, low-profile team that consistently invests in star projects across the industry chain.

Currently, Yuanhe Houwang is tirelessly raising funds for its third phase. As market sentiment warms, more high-quality companies are opening financing windows, and Yuanhe Houwang managing partner Zeng Zhijie judges, “This is precisely the strategic window for deploying high-quality assets right now.”

From Yitang to Shenghe Jingwei

A glimpse of an industry circle emerges

“Connecting the past and the future.” Zeng Zhijie summarizes the past year in this way.

The outside world is not unfamiliar with Yuanhe Houwang. Going back to late 2017, Yuanhe Holdings and Houwang Investment jointly initiated the establishment of Yuanhe Houwang—led by industry veteran Zeng Zhijie, forming a diversified team with backgrounds in investment, entrepreneurship, and industry, which has since become active on China’s venture capital stage.

Yuanhe Houwang managing partner Zeng Zhijie

Eight years on, Yuanhe Houwang has delivered a phased report card. Exits are always an important standard to measure an institution’s true strength. Zeng Zhijie reveals, “By 2025, the overall exit scale and pace of the team will reach new highs since the fund’s inception.” Just as the past year’s IPO boom was evident, Yuanhe Houwang has also entered a rare harvest season.

I still remember July last year, when Yitang Shares successfully listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. It is a provider of integrated circuit manufacturing equipment, offering solutions including dry etch equipment, rapid thermal processing equipment, and dry etching equipment to global IC manufacturers. Its latest market value exceeded 65 billion yuan.

As early as September 2020, recognizing the wave of domestic high-end semiconductor development, Yuanhe Houwang participated in Yitang’s Series B financing, accompanying its listing.

By the end of that year, Yuanhe Houwang also achieved another Sci-Tech Innovation Board IPO—Hengkunn New Materials. Also from the semiconductor industry chain, Hengkunn mainly engages in R&D, production, and sales of lithography and precursor materials. It is a “hidden champion” in photoresist. On the first day of trading, its market value once exceeded 28 billion yuan, becoming Xiamen’s largest IPO project that year.

The latest scene is the successful approval of Shenghe Jingwei’s IPO on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, a leading domestic advanced packaging and testing company. There are also IPOs for Yeyan Fucai and Zhenbao Technology on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, as well as Jieli Beijiao listed on the Beijing Stock Exchange, all poised for launch. This indicates that, as their common investors, 2026 will be a big IPO year for Yuanhe Houwang.

So far, Yuanhe Houwang has achieved 12 IPOs, with a strong Sci-Tech Innovation Board flavor. Looking at the list, many familiar leading companies stand out: Rongbai Technology, Anlu Technology, Juxin, SenseTime… forming a powerful network of invested industry leaders.

In addition, over the past year, Yuanhe Houwang has also realized multiple exits through secondary share transfers, M&A, and restructuring, providing good liquidity for the fund. “The total exit amount for the year hit a record high, significantly improving the fund’s DPI,” Zeng Zhijie summarizes.

Talking about investments, Zeng Zhijie shares the same feeling as many investors: “With macroeconomic stabilization and the push of new technologies like AI, market activity will significantly increase by 2025, creating a better growth environment for tech companies.”

This change is also reflected in internal investment actions—compared to an average of ten or so investments in previous years, Yuanhe Houwang invested over twenty companies in 2025, systematically deploying in key fields like semiconductors, new materials, and AI infrastructure. Zeng Zhijie explains, “As market sentiment warms, more high-quality companies’ financing windows reopen, and valuations become more reasonable, allowing us to invest in core links at more advantageous prices.”

One of the most representative investments this year was in Jieyue Xingchen, which completed over 5 billion yuan in Series B+ funding at the end of January, creating the largest single financing in China’s large model track in the past 12 months. Yuanhe Houwang, as one of the investors, made another key move in AI infrastructure. According to market sources, Jieyue Xingchen plans to list in Hong Kong within the year, signaling another major IPO on the horizon.

Steady and far-reaching, Yuanhe Houwang is entering the next stage—establishing an Innovation and Growth Phase III Fund. Industry insiders have learned that Yuanhe Houwang’s second-phase fund has completed investments and is entering the exit management period; its market-oriented Nantong Growth Fund will also end its investment period within the year and move into the exit stage. Meanwhile, the team has set up multiple regional blind pool funds and special funds, with total management scale approaching 8 billion yuan.

Spring waters often start with fundraising. Zeng Zhijie introduces that Yuanhe Houwang’s third-phase fund has begun fundraising, with a target size of 1-1.5 billion yuan, and the progress is smooth. On one hand, the team clearly focuses on “hard tech in growth stage,” with the fund prioritizing frontier hard tech fields and the integration of AI into vertical applications.

On the other hand, Yuanhe Houwang has completed some forward-looking layouts and project reserves. Zeng Zhijie reveals, “We have made some early foresight investments through previous funds and established a reserve pool covering over a hundred high-quality projects.”

How Industry Snipers Are Made

In recent years, peers’ impressions of Yuanhe Houwang have become clearer.

Deeply rooted in industry, Yuanhe Houwang has long focused on investment opportunities at key nodes in the core industry chain. “From macro to micro, layer by layer screening,” summarizes Yu Wei, the executive partner. This stems from the top-level design summarized since Yuanhe Houwang’s founding: combining national strategies with their own capabilities, they focus on semiconductor, intelligent manufacturing, new energy, and new materials—ensuring they establish cognitive advantages in tracks with high barriers and urgent industry needs, thus defining the main investment trajectory.

Yuanhe Houwang executive partner Yu Wei

Second, within chosen tracks, Yuanhe Houwang emphasizes targeting critical nodes. Yu Wei explains that by dissecting the entire industry chain, the team focuses on those with the highest technical thresholds, lowest localization rates, and strategic hub characteristics—these “key nodes” are crucial. Breakthroughs here can effectively unlock the entire industry chain’s independence and controllability.

But this does not mean casting a wide net; it’s about precise targeting—only investing in the best players. For each specific segment, Yuanhe Houwang conducts in-depth comparisons across technology, team, market, stage fit, and their own value addition. An explicit standard they follow is: “Usually only 1-2 top contenders are invested in at each sub-node,” adhering to a sniper approach.

This methodology is well reflected in Yuanhe Houwang’s past investments. Take the semiconductor chain as an example: after two decades of investment, the team early on identified FPGA chips as a critical gap. As early as 2015, Zeng Zhijie led the team to discover and invest in Anlu Information, then struggling, becoming its first institutional investor. Since Yuanhe Houwang’s founding, they increased their stake again in 2019, accompanying its rise to IPO.

Ten years on, Zeng Zhijie’s judgment has been validated. Known as the “universal chip,” FPGA now has widespread applications in semiconductors, communications, transportation, finance, industrial automation, medical devices, robotics, drones, data centers, aerospace, and more. According to its website, Anlu Technology’s SALFPGA® chips have shipped over 200 million units.

The primary market has never lacked temptation. But for an investment institution, what’s precious is the ability to consistently adhere to strict standards regardless of industry cycles.

After Anlu Technology, Yuanhe Houwang continued extending into upstream critical segments of the industry chain—leading to the investment story of Shenghe Jingwei. In June 2021, when Shenghe Jingwei began independent operations, Yuanhe Houwang and several well-known institutions became shareholders.

At that time, Yuanhe Houwang judged that Shenghe Jingwei’s focus on 12-inch middle bump and 3DIC multi-chip integration advanced packaging technologies was a core path to breaking through computing power bottlenecks and meeting high-performance chip demands in the AI era, with high technical barriers and first-mover advantages. Shenghe Jingwei had already achieved multiple “firsts” technologically, prompting further investments. Yu Wei reveals that, to date, Yuanhe Houwang has invested a total of 1.2 billion yuan in Shenghe Jingwei through various funds.

Additionally, along the critical segments of the semiconductor industry chain, Yuanhe Houwang invested in equipment provider Yitang Shares—one of China’s few manufacturers capable of mass-producing etching equipment; and in materials company Hengkunn New Materials, whose SOC and BARC products ranked first among domestic suppliers in 2023 sales… now, all are listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board.

This has formed a powerful, tightly connected industry circle. During exchanges, Zeng Zhijie repeatedly mentions one word—deep cultivation. The logic behind it is simple: the deeper the industry engagement, the better the ability to screen and deploy opportunities, and the broader the support for invested companies. Today, under the leadership of an eight-partner team, Yuanhe Houwang’s investment reach and resource network have systematically covered key industrial clusters like the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei.

Evolving within Industry

Embracing the AI historic opportunity

Looking back over eight years, Zeng Zhijie feels most deeply: “Stay true to the core amid change, focus on capabilities through evolution.”

The Chinese venture capital market is bustling, with cycles of change. Continuous evolution has become a hallmark of Yuanhe Houwang’s team. Just as during the internet boom, they invested in ByteDance, JD Logistics, Jitu Express, SenseTime—driven by technological upgrades in industry and consumption; ten years ago, amid growth slowdown caused by supply-side reforms, geopolitical conflicts, and the pandemic, they began focusing on industry chain transformations centered on original and自主可控 technologies, thus accurately capturing structural opportunities at different stages of China’s economy.

Now, the AI wave is surging. Yu Wei judges that the current structural opportunity stems from a systemic technological revolution centered on artificial intelligence, spanning the entire industry chain.

Specifically, Yuanhe Houwang divides the AI industry into five layers: core computing power (chips and hardware), infrastructure (energy, cooling, connectivity), models and algorithms (software core), toolchains and platforms (enabling layer), and industry applications and solutions (value realization).

At first glance, Yuanhe Houwang’s past focus on semiconductors and new materials seems disconnected from AI. “It’s not about chasing the trend, but clearly defining our capability boundaries,” Yu Wei explains. Based on the team’s accumulated experience and capabilities, Yuanhe Houwang is systematically deploying key materials and components in computing infrastructure, and investing heavily in industry leaders that deeply integrate scenarios and build barriers in application fields.

To some extent, the deep industry knowledge, resource network, and “sniper” approach accumulated over eight years in hard tech give Yuanhe Houwang a unique investment advantage. First, their deep cultivation of the entire semiconductor chain allows precise identification of critical supporting links for AI computing power—such as high-speed optical modules and advanced thermal materials—that are essential yet undervalued by the market.

Second, Yuanhe Houwang has established a solid industrial ecosystem in intelligent manufacturing and enterprise services, enabling them not only to judge technological advancement but also whether solutions can truly solve problems in specific scenarios. This helps them assist invested AI companies in quickly connecting with customers and achieving deployment. Currently, Yuanhe Houwang’s AI investments include Jieyue Xingchen, Magic Atom, and Xiao Shentong Technology, exemplifying this approach.

“The market has passed the downturn.” Yu Wei firmly believes that the disruptive impact of AI on traditional industries has just begun, and will bring a wave of new business models and investment opportunities. AI infrastructure is expected to explode.

However, based on experience crossing cycles, Yuanhe Houwang remains cautious: “Technological innovation ultimately needs to be implemented in real scenarios to create value. It requires patient capital and a vigorous application market to cultivate.” But a current challenge is the pressure on demand and capital patience.

Fortunately, change is happening. A landmark event is the official unveiling of the National Venture Capital Guidance Fund, focusing on hard tech, with a 20-year lifespan and an expected mobilization of trillions in social capital. How to precisely connect with and leverage this national strategic opportunity is a key issue for all GP firms.

For Yuanhe Houwang, focusing on hard tech, with clear strategies and industry empowerment, still allows them to gain recognition through differentiated advantages in niche tracks. Currently, they manage multiple special funds and remain active. “LPs’ new preference is—favoring high-certainty, strongly aligned thematic opportunities,” which precisely reflects Yuanhe Houwang’s accumulated strengths.

Now, Yuanhe Houwang is about to迎来 its first decade. When asked about the biggest insights over these years, Zeng Zhijie admits, “Investment is ultimately the realization of cognition, and the most valuable cognition comes from respect and deep cultivation of industry.” True long-termism is often reflected in choices made during each industry cycle. The so-called friends of time are ultimately friends of industry.