At the heart of the industry's bubble debate lies not whether a "bubble" exists but how to differentiate between ephemeral bubble-spawned enterprises and those with enduring vitality. Only the latter can transcend the bubble and unlock the door to a new era.

Editor: Di Xintong

The primary market kicked off 2025 with a theme of "warmth." Investors observed a surge in Embodied Learning Society activity, signaling a structural recovery. Data revealed that domestic primary market financing transactions hit a five-quarter high in Q1.

Amidst this initial market warmth, Huaying Capital has spearheaded investment acceleration. Ji Wei, Founding Managing Partner, revealed at the recent Huaying Capital Annual Conference that the company's investment volume since the year's start has surpassed three times that of last year, marking a robust layout momentum.

However, acceleration does not equate to "blind pursuit." When discussing investment logic amidst new opportunities, Ji Wei analyzed two prevalent industry observation dimensions: sub-sector focus (e.g., new energy, new materials, smart cars, AI) and enterprise development stage (early, growth, mature).

She emphasized that Huaying Capital's technology investments deeply integrate the industrial development cycle and are considered within the context of the great power game, thus accurately timing strategic interventions. Ji Wei further materialized this investment philosophy into three dimensions, or "three rights":

First, the right to define — disruptive technologies in their nascent stages yet poised to profoundly impact economy and society (e.g., quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, controlled nuclear fusion). Huaying acts early, laying the groundwork for leading enterprises and teams, with a focus on technology productization.

Second, the right to dominate — evident in the trillion-yuan racetracks characterized by long industrial chains and substantial upstream-downstream investments. Areas like new energy and future embodied intelligence witness fierce competition between China and the US. Huaying adopts an industrial coverage-oriented racetrack layout.

Third, the right to participate — encompassing efficiency upgrades in mature industrial chains and local leadership (e.g., chips, semiconductors, civil aviation engines, operating systems). Here, Huaying emphasizes the certainty of scaled revenue.

Within this precise investment framework, the "right to dominate" dimension is pivotal for venture capital institutions — it anchors trillion-yuan strategic racetracks tied to production relation and factor changes, a core arena for great power games.

As market warmth grows akin to spring river flow, Huaying Capital keenly captures this recovery pulse. For embodied intelligence, with its disruptive potential and strategic heights, the institution's forward-looking layout and deep involvement underscore its grasp of timely opportunities and "right to dominate" investment philosophy.

Find assets that truly cross cycles

Embodied intelligence follows an unprecedented development path.

Fundamentally, embodied intelligence drives a paradigm shift in production relations and factors. Investors bet on both the commercial space from new technology industrial transformations and the next era's key engine. Practically, this path attracts top talents from various fields. Early-stage capital's "invest in people" logic validates founding team backgrounds. Moreover, embodied intelligence has transcended the "PPT financing" stage, with products now routinely applied in industrial, commercial, and other scenarios.

This underlying grand narrative and superficial prosperity have driven a significant valuation surge in embodied intelligence enterprises, with some startups surpassing 10 billion yuan in valuation within two years. Due to its unique development path and revolutionary logic, constructing a mature valuation reference system remains challenging, leading to the "valuation bubble" discussion.

Huaying Capital offers insights. Director Liu Tianjie believes moderate bubbles are not entirely negative as they attract incremental capital and talent.

"When assessing an industry bubble, we must consider the industry's intrinsic value. If it's valuable in the long run, current pricing is not a bubble question but a value-price match," said Liu Tianjie.

Analogous to US enterprise valuation, domestic embodied intelligence valuation is not only reasonable but relatively low, far from "real bubble" overvaluation. As Xingdong Jiyuan Founder Chen Jianyu noted, the industry is far from the bubble stage.

The core debate is not whether a "bubble" exists but distinguishing between bubble-spawned enterprises and those with enduring vitality. Only the latter can transcend bubbles and unlock the door to a new era.

Ji Wei, Huaying Capital's Managing Partner, emphasized discovering enterprises that cross market cycles. Liu Tianjie elaborated, "Our key screening logic assesses whether a target enterprise can sustain viability without new financing for over two years in extreme scenarios."

Image source: Huaying Capital

Huaying Capital's invested enterprise Zibian Robotics exemplifies this. Focusing on embodied intelligence's "brain," it leverages AI capabilities, offering a smarter brain to meet the needs of refined operations and stable performance in unstructured, highly dynamic environments. Zibian's robots are now applied in multi-step complex task scenarios.

Amidst industry debates on "end-to-end" technical routes, Zibian focuses on end-to-end large model research, aligning with overseas enterprises like Skild AI, Google DeepMind, and Physical Intelligence (PI). Its self-developed Great Wall series operational large model, WALL-A, boasts multi-modal information fusion capabilities, integrating visual, language, and motion control signals for a complete perception-to-execution loop.

Zibian Robotics stated, "WALL-A has demonstrated zero-shot generalization ability in multiple unseen physical scenarios, a key threshold for general robot capabilities, especially in long sequences and complex motion control."

At the start of 2025, Morgan Stanley released a humanoid robot value map, noting China's lack of a "brain." Zibian Robotics is developing China's brain and is one of the few domestic embodied intelligence enterprises investing in basic model research.

Zibian Robotics' deep cultivation of underlying technologies forms a core barrier for crossing market cycles, validating Huaying Capital's investment philosophy.

Another Huaying Capital case study highlights embodied intelligence's feasibility. Invested enterprise Magic Atom proposes Qianjing Co-creation, with its humanoid robot "Xiaomai" already undergoing practical training and application in factories and retail. Magic Atom Founder Wu Changzheng said that humanoid robots must become "useful, easy to use, and used by someone" to unleash new-quality productivity's value, tap sustainable business potential, and enable robots to truly land and be applied across industries.

This unique commercialization route embodies embodied intelligence enterprises' self-hematopoiesis "certainty," finding new incisions in homogenized routes to complete the industrial closed loop.

CloudMinds Technology, another Huaying Capital investment, focuses on independent research and development and lean production of humanoid and quadruped robots and their core components. It leads the B-end applications market in areas like power inspection and emergency rescue.

The "Tsinghua system" enterprise Xingdong Jiyuan has delivered over 200 products this year, with hundreds of orders in mass production and delivery. Over 50% of orders come from overseas customers, swiftly leading embodied intelligence technology overseas and gathering leading customers from various industries like Haier Smart Home, Lenovo, and Beijing Machinery & Automation Institute Technology.

Image source: Xingdong Jiyuan

Notably, within days, Huaying Capital's invested enterprises CloudMinds Technology and Xingdong Jiyuan announced nearly 500 million yuan in new financing. Investors' dense support indirectly confirms Huaying Capital's forward-looking layout amidst industry changes.

These cases show that as the industry debates bubbles, real assets have built asymmetric advantages in technological breakthroughs, ecological coordination, and scenario penetration. Embodied intelligence's ultimate competition lies not in short-term prices but long-term value.

Look for opportunities upwards

Cross-validation to feel the industrial pulse

Huaying Capital's investment map in embodied intelligence is extending upstream.

Besides investing in ontology enterprises like Zibian Robotics, Magic Atom, and Xingdong Jiyuan, Ji Wei stated, "We will accelerate strategic deployment of upstream core components." In her view, the embodied intelligence racetrack will deeply integrate local industrial chains and manufacturing, yielding greater economic and social benefits across the ecosystem.

This decision stems from a clear industrial prediction: as ontology enterprises move towards mass production, component demand will explode exponentially. For instance, each additional degree of freedom in the ontology corresponds to an additional upstream order unit. Even with an initial ontology shipment of 10,000 units, component order volume jumps to 100,000 units.

However, behind the upstream market's broad prospects and certain orders lies the "lack of standardization" pain point.

A leading ontology enterprise executive revealed to the Embodied Learning Society, "Currently, ineffective supply in the supply chain far outstrips effective supply." Many ontology enterprises hold orders but face capacity constraints. The challenge is not "unable to produce" but a lack of capacity compatible with humanoid robots.

This reveals a core contradiction: the certainty of market space (moving upwards) and the uncertainty of technical standards (how to move) create significant tension.

Ji Wei elaborated on Huaying Capital's upstream layout logic to the Embodied Learning Society. First, make advance layouts of key technologies and bottleneck components. Second, conduct cross-validation. "On one hand, we observe complete machine factory procurements, making advance layouts of key technologies and bottleneck components. On the other hand, we reverse-deduce which complete machine factories have better shipment volumes from component shipment volumes."

From the first perspective, advance layouts of bottleneck technologies promote technology conversion through capital assistance, urging the industry forward while securing an early position. From the second perspective, this logic essentially opens up the "complete machine demand-component adaptation" industrial closed loop, accurately capturing "hidden champions" validated in real working conditions. This is not only the shortest path to identifying effective suppliers but also an excellent industry diagnostic tool.

The significance of cross-validation lies not merely in its ability to uncover the current needs of ontology enterprises for various components, but also in its capacity to foresee future supplier demands by analyzing shifts in the development trajectory of these enterprises, enabling early strategic planning.

Observations from Huaying Capital reveal that upstream components and materials are evolving towards miniaturization, lightweight design, and enhanced adaptability to operating conditions. This includes a demand for high torque density, high-performance components, and improved lightweight and performance specifications for structural materials. Meanwhile, servo motors (such as frameless torque motors and direct drive motors) and high-precision harmonic reducers (planetary reducers) exhibit a trend towards reduced system precision requirements. On the operational front, multi-modal data is essential for enhancing interaction and operational capabilities, with force/tactile sensors poised to enter a new phase of development.

The cross-validation approach serves as the cornerstone for Huaying Capital to extend its investment reach into the finer details of the industry. Only by diving deep into the industry to uncover developmental trends can we truly identify scarce investment targets with the potential to navigate economic cycles and stay attuned to the "industrial pulse".

Patient Capital:

Beyond Time's Friend, a Companion in the Times' Struggle

Huaying Capital's investment strategy in embodied intelligence underscores that patient capital is not merely about exchanging time for space or passively awaiting corporate growth. Its essence lies in adopting the role of a "companion in the times' struggle," resonating with the tides of the era, deeply engaging in, and actively shaping the process of industrial transformation.

This deep-seated connection and long-term empowerment not only accelerates the transition of technology from the laboratory to industrialization but also provides robust capital support and a fertile ecological environment for the rise of local forces in the context of future great power competition. Therefore, the essence of "patient capital" is to be a "companion in the times' struggle," with its value ultimately solidifying as a pivotal footnote in the ascent of major industries.