In the past, sexy stories were more likely to gain the favor of capital; today, however, steady progress is the key to long-term success.

Written by|Lan Dong Business Zhao Weiwei

Startup companies can be broadly classified into two categories: one follows a typical Silicon Valley model, while the other pursues an atypical growth path.

The former, exemplified by Musk's SpaceX, started with the mission of colonizing Mars. Driven by a strong sense of mission, it prioritized good deeds before considering future prospects. Starting with small rockets, it gradually increased engine thrust while reducing weight and enabling reusability, transforming the impossible into reality through iterative steps.

The latter category includes companies like ByteDance. Zhang Yiming initially focused on niche scenarios in real estate information and honed recommendation algorithms. These algorithms later found application in the field of information graphics, gradually establishing Jinri Toutiao's dominance over portal clients. When the algorithm recommendation technology was extended to the short video market, it gained a broader market globally.

The former starts off sexy, with a high pitch, ambitious mission, capital favor, and extreme difficulty; the latter begins modestly, with a low pitch, small scenarios, and a focus on honing technology through small, steady steps.

In the past, sexy stories were more likely to gain the favor of capital; today, however, steady progress is the key to long-term success.

Years later, the latter will eventually become sexy as well, as its technology represents another vast universe, reaping success in different scenarios. Both converge into the same river, becoming globally leading unicorn companies in valuation.

From 0 to 1

With a hammer in hand, one seeks nails. The nail may be small, but the hammer is a universe of stars and dust.

Huang Xiaohuang, Chairman of Qunhe Technology, read a book at the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey that later became a must-read in computer graphics: "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation" (abbreviated as PBR).

The book explains how to use physics-based principles to simulate the interaction between light and matter, achieving more realistic effects in computer graphics. Drawing on his experience as a software engineer at NVIDIA, Huang Xiaohuang realized that PBR would be an important direction for future high-performance computing.

As expected, around 2010, PBR gradually became the industry standard for the gaming and animation industries. Movies like "Avatar" and "Alita: Battle Angel" adopted this efficient, realistic, and parametric technology. Games like "Call of Duty" also made PBR one of the most mainstream rendering methods in the gaming industry.

Technologists like to describe PBR as a "Qi Cultivation" approach, as it's not just a technology but also a way of thinking or a school of practice. They strive for greater physical accuracy in finer details, believing there's no ultimate PBR, only more PBR.

So, beyond movies and games, what is the third path for this "Qi Cultivation" approach? Qunhe Technology integrates low-cost GPU clusters for end-cloud collaboration, optimizing scheduling strategies for computing resources. With lower computing costs, it achieves faster computation speeds, making rapid cloud rendering possible.

The first industry targeted by Huang Xiaohuang and his team of alumni Chen Hang and Zhu Hao was the home furnishing industry. Qunhe Technology's initial cloud design software, Kuajiale, renowned for its 10-second rapid rendering, became a hit in this industry.

At that time, the internet home furnishing industry was booming, with a large number of home furnishing companies transforming under the impetus of the internet. This coincided with the wave of iterative demand for home furnishing consumption in China, where people increasingly sought intelligent and personalized consumer products. Therefore, companies and products like Kuajiale became powerful tools to empower home furnishing enterprises, gaining widespread recognition from the capital market.

During the Spring Festival, just a few months after Kuajiale's launch, the company's servers were overwhelmed daily due to its impressive user experience. With low barriers to entry, users could see rendering results in seconds and quickly view design plans. Driven by user engagement and spontaneous sharing, many began designing their own homes. Previously, hiring a decorator often came at a significant cost.

By enabling customers to make money more efficiently than before, Kuajiale naturally succeeded in capturing the home design market. As a "Qi Cultivation" approach, PBR started with a small entry point but became a path to unlocking new possibilities, marking the beginning of Qunhe Technology's atypical growth.

Trend Transformation

The pursuit of greater physical accuracy has no end.

At that time, the industry was pursuing the market demand for a more realistic visual experience in the virtual world. For example, NVIDIA began betting on the AI wave in 2016 and introduced the Turing architecture, the eighth-generation GPU architecture, the following year. This architecture targeted a new ray-tracing core that could accelerate ray tracing, making real-time ray tracing possible for the first time.

While the underlying technology is evolving, applications are expanding in depth.

Relying on its technological advantages, Qunhe Technology's products stand out. Kuajiale, which requires no downloads and can be used directly in the cloud, improves design output efficiency and enables users to achieve rapid marketing and conversion. This path quickly expanded from the home furnishing industry to larger space design, where a deeper level of physical accuracy is also required.

How to quickly simulate the physical world? This is not only a technical challenge but also a systematic engineering problem. Qunhe Technology's uniqueness lies in its powerful Qunhe Qizhen Rendering Engine and the long-accumulated Qunhe Matrix CAD Engine.

The former aims to make design "what you see is what you get." Its technical highlight is the combination of ray tracing, cloud integration, and AI technology, enabling realistic and real-time rendering of the physical world. The latter's highlight is translating, compatibilizing, and circulating design data from the physical world, enabling machines to understand space similarly to humans, thereby generating structured data that conforms to physical reality. Over the years, Qunhe's platform has accumulated vast amounts of physically accurate 2D and 3D data.

For example, in custom home furnishing manufacturing, Kuajiale can directly generate design plans, which can be used for flexible production. Construction drawings and quotations can also be generated simultaneously. Domestic brands such as Sophia, Oppein, and Kuka Home have become customers of Qunhe Technology.

In an era of Stock economy , enterprises need solutions that can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

One prominent scenario is cross-border e-commerce. To compete head-on with foreign enterprises, it's crucial to have advantages in efficiency and cost, breaking traditional time-consuming and costly methods. They often use more three-dimensional 3D displays to attract customers, making the e-commerce scenario a new battlefield for Qunhe Technology in terms of physical accuracy.

Cross-border e-commerce enterprises can achieve virtual shooting on Kuajiale without physically shooting physical products. This reduces shooting time from several days to just 30 minutes, allowing for online location selection, fine-tuning, and rendering. A cross-border enterprise with only two or three operators can produce over 100 images and 5-10 videos daily, capable of shooting over 10,000 product groups annually.

Efficiency improvements are also evident in chain businesses.

Meixue Bingcheng, with over 30,000 stores, chose Qunhe Kuajiale, a cloud design software under Qunhe Technology, in 2022, significantly enhancing store implementation efficiency. The fastest design and drawing of a store can be completed in just three hours.

Along with chain brands like Heytea, Xijiezhachuan, and Gu Ming, these consumer chain brands aiming for tens of thousands of stores rely on Qunhe Technology's products and supply chain for faster expansion on one hand and higher customer acquisition efficiency through the brand effect of tens of thousands of stores on the other. The positive flywheel of efficiency improvement keeps spinning.

From home furnishing to full-space design, gradually entering all scenarios requiring space design, Qunhe Technology's growth from 1 to 100 is a 100-fold amplification of 1, not a repetition of 1 for 100 times.

In terms of physical accuracy, NVIDIA and others determine the level, while Qunhe Technology and others determine the speed. The relationship between the two brings about a spiral upward trend in industrial transformation.

As commercial applications continue to deepen and prosper, they help people create and develop better, improving productivity in various scenarios, be it home furnishing or broader full-space designs.

In the past decade, products represented by Kuajiale have accumulated massive amounts of physically accurate underlying data for Qunhe Technology through the space design process across various industries. The Qunhe Qizhen Rendering Engine can render 99% of materials in the real physical world, covering rendering needs in multiple fields such as 3C electronics, household appliances, home furnishing soft decorations, and outdoors.

Physical accuracy is the anchor for Qunhe Technology's uniqueness, while scenario changes are the sails that catch the wind. It is precisely because of the technological capabilities built around physical accuracy that Kuajiale's design data can be quickly converted into production data and connected to backend production links, truly enabling enterprises to achieve full-chain digital management from frontend design to backend production.

If Sora represents a glimpse of the future that has already emerged, how sexy will an AI-powered "physical world simulator" be? Qunhe Technology, with its firmly anchored and sail-bearing approach, is undoubtedly one of the most determined advocates of physical accuracy.

Flywheel Rotation

The magic of technology lies in continuously opening up more possibilities, and physical accuracy is the gateway to the future.

For Qunhe Technology, it has successfully become a microcosm of China's industrial digitization. By extending industrial routes with hardcore physically accurate technologies and deploying related diversified business layouts, it has formed innovative businesses that continue to penetrate into different scenarios.

Kuajiale is such an atypical startup company. It was once seen as an online and efficient cloud design software serving the home furnishing industry, focusing on indoor rendering scenarios for Chinese home furnishing consumers and entering the home decoration scene with 10-second cloud rendering. In reality, Kuajiale is just one of the products grown on Qunhe Technology's technological foundation, driven by its powerful underlying rendering technology and independent research and development capabilities.

Over the past decade, Kuajiale has gradually expanded from home furnishing to chain businesses, cross-border e-commerce, commercial spaces, and other full scenarios requiring space design. It boasts over 320 million 3D models and an average of 77.8 million monthly active visitors.

This transformation process is similar to other rising digital industries, all following a spiral upward trend through four steps: from digitizing various links with digital technology, to networking through data connection, then promoting human-machine collaboration and intelligence, and ultimately realizing the intellectualization of major elements in the system driven by humans. Each step lays the foundation for the next.

Especially in the current AI wave, computing power, algorithms, and data are the three key elements for development. NVIDIA monopolizes computing power, large model companies advance side by side in algorithms, and Qunhe Technology holds the greatest advantage in spatial data.

Large video models have high requirements for underlying data because the larger the training data volume, the higher the sample quality will be. In the indoor field, only Qunhe Technology possesses massive amounts of physically accurate indoor spatial data and collaborates with research institutions on embodied intelligence, AIGC, AR, and VR.

Globally, why can only Qunhe Technology achieve this?

This is inseparable from the accumulation of the past decade. Qunhe Technology is absolutely leading in terms of design scheme volume and commodity material data. In the domestic design software field, Qunhe Technology holds an absolute market share advantage. Beyond GPU clusters, the Qunhe Qizhen Rendering Engine, and the Qunhe Matrix CAD Engine, the Qunhe Spatial Intelligence Data Platform not only provides massive data and schemes but also offers data generalization capabilities through data engines, directly outputting data products.

Today, Qunhe Technology's newly released Qunhe Spatial Intelligence Platform is a driving flywheel for the future AI era, making software sexy again.

For example, the SPEAR realistic intelligent machine simulation platform created by Qunhe Technology and Intel solves issues in the industry such as inefficient data collection, poor scenario reusability, high training risks, and assessment difficulties. It constructs a series of high-precision virtual environments with physical interaction characteristics. These environments not only provide realistic visual effects but also ensure physical authenticity, providing researchers with a safe and efficient learning and testing space.

Companies in the robotics industry can also solve the time-consuming and labor-intensive problem of data collection through the open platform. Previously, sweeping robots cleaned cat litter through collision, which was ineffective. Now, pre-training in virtual space enables accurate identification of cat litter.

In a specially created indoor virtual environment, by adjusting lighting parameters and algorithm support, tens of thousands of high-quality 3D model data sets and millions of refined image sets can be generated in a short time, significantly improving project progress and cost-effectiveness.

The flywheel drives Qunhe Technology to solve new problems in the AI era. Ready-to-use industry solutions mean it creates a super app market for full-space scenarios. Countless AI enterprises in cutting-edge fields such as AIGC, embodied intelligence, AR/VR will solidify their data foundations in the middle, truly embarking on a path that simulates physical accuracy and the digital world.

What kind of company will Qunhe Technology be in ten years?

At least for now, the path described by Huang Xiaohuang is already very clear. Built on the foundation of the Qunhe Qizhen Rendering Engine and the Qunhe Matrix CAD Engine, Qunhe Technology's products will connect the physically real world through AI, becoming a bridge between the digital virtual world and the physically real world. This bridge will not create illusions but will become a physically accurate world simulator.