Chinese venture capital firm Lanchi Ventures is doubling down on investing in China’s artificial intelligence and robotics start-ups while raising a new fund amid increased global investor appetite for the country’s early-stage tech firms, its executives said.
Lanchi Ventures, formerly known as BlueRun Ventures China, would continue to be “all in” on AI and robotics, focusing on AI applications, multimodal AI models and firms targeting overseas markets, managing partner Jui Tan said in an interview with the South China Morning Post last week.
The firm manages over 15 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion), including a 5.5 billion yuan fund largely focused on AI. It has so far placed bets on Moonshot AI, the firm behind the Kimi large language models, AI agent maker Genspark, and robotics firms Galbot and AgiBot.
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Lanchi said it remained committed to investing in Chinese embodied AI start-ups because of the continuously improving abilities of robots and the abundance of applications in fields such as manufacturing.
“China has many scenarios that allow [robots] to acquire data, so I believe there isn’t a significant gap compared to the United States,” Tan said. “In fact, we might even perform better, possibly due to this substantial advantage in data.”
AI is still in its early days, with many new applications and capabilities yet to emerge in the future, according to Tan.
While China was still catching up in advanced semiconductors, which once presented hurdles for Chinese AI investment amid US chip curbs, local AI firms have since adapted and found various solutions for computing power, Tan said.
“They can’t entirely bet on Nvidia or completely bet on Chinese solutions,” Tan said. “They all pursue multiple paths.”
While Lanchi’s current 5.5 billlion yuan fund still has “a lot of dry powder”, it is now in the process of raising a new fund to keep investing in China’s AI start-ups, with an eye out for “new capabilities and new boundaries” that could “significantly enhance productivity”, Tan said.
He said that Lanchi’s upcoming fund would be similar in size to its current ones, without disclosing the exact target amount. The firm had already raised a portion of the capital, according to Tan.
While the new fund’s limited partners would mainly come from Asia, including China, Lanchi was also having ongoing discussions with institutions in the US, according to Lanchi Ventures partner Elissa Liu.
While American investments in China’s tech sector have fizzled in recent years amid rising geopolitical tensions, Liu said that the sentiment has been changing.
“Ultimately, capital is inherently profit-driven … and it comes down to where they can generate returns,” Liu said. “After a recalibration, they’ll make new decisions. And that’s what we have felt recently – there has been an increase in activity and attention, including from the United States.”
“People can see that in this wave of AI development, the US and China are the leading forces, and we are seeing more Chinese AI entrepreneurs with a global vision,” Tan said. “So we feel that there’s been more global investors paying attention.”
Lanchi, which dropped its previous Silicon Valley brand BlueRun in 2023, last year expanded its operations to Hong Kong, looking to support the global expansion of Chinese firms. Overseas markets remain a main theme for Lanchi’s investments, and Hong Kong served as a great place to capture talent, according to the executives.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
