Light Source Capital Behind 10 IPOs Including Unitree and MetaX, Justifying Its Downstream-to-Upstream Playbook

创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-12

In an interview with Chuangyebang, Zhu Jia, partner at Light Source Capital (光合创投), walks through the firm's hard-tech investing playbook.

Track record: 10 IPOs in 18 months, including MetaX (沐曦, +692.95% on debut, market cap once above 400B RMB), Unitree (listed Aug 2026, market cap above 400B RMB on day one), Zhipu, and Momenta; the firm raised over 5B RMB across two funds in April, the largest China VC fundraise this year.
Method: "Penetrate from downstream to upstream" — start from terminal market leaders (smartphones, EVs, cloud) and trace up the supply chain to components and chips; this produced bets on Hesai and Innolight, and now extends to AI compute, networking, power, and robot parts.
MetaX: Met founder Chen Weiliang (ex-AMD China GPU lead) a month after founding; the thesis rested on his tape-out experience and an unusually software-first architecture, with software and hardware engineers growing at roughly 1:1.
Unitree: Tracked Wang Xingxing for four years before investing at a 3.5B RMB valuation in mid-2024; the trigger was that nearly every top Silicon Valley embodied-AI lab buys Unitree robots as their R&D platform — the firm sees Unitree as a potential "Nvidia of robotics."
On the bubble: Calls the current embodied-AI cooldown a healthy correction, favoring early contrarian entries (invested in Zizhiliang at under 1B RMB, now worth over 20B).

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