Linear Capital's 2025 Investor Conference was held in Beijing on November 6-7, with more than 150 global LPs and founding teams of portfolio companies attending. The theme was "To be or not to be, in the AI dominated future".
Holiday Robotics has unveiled Friday, an industrial humanoid robot whose hands use a 500-gram, 20-DOF hydraulic ultralight design, with about 80% of their surface covered by self-made tactile sensors that can sense a force of 0.01N (about 1g), as well as direction and torque.
At a roundtable dialogue with Rokid founder and CEO Misa Zhu at the Hangzhou Future Life Festival, Kevin Kelly mentioned Rokid twice and said he is bullish on the smart glasses form factor. Rokid glasses raised $3.61 million on Kickstarter, breaking the XR industry crowdfunding record. Linear Capital was Rokid's earliest investor and has increased its stake across multiple rounds.
In September, Linear Capital and its founder and CEO Wang Huai were included in 36Kr's 2025 China Industrial Investor Annual Directory lists of embodied intelligence, artificial intelligence, and new quality productive forces industry investment institutions and investors. Linear Capital was also named to Cyzone's 2025 Top 12 Most Admired Early-Stage Investment Institutions and its Most Admired Venture Capital Institutions in Artificial Intelligence, and was rated among the Fund of Funds Research Center's 2025 Top 10 Best Early-Stage Funds in the Yangtze River Delta region.
Linear Capital founder and CEO Wang Huai published an article on the firm's 11th anniversary, reviewing its investment journey over the past eleven years and announcing that its core strategy for the next three to five years and even the coming decade will center on "strong AI." It will focus on three major areas: AI plus software/applications, AI plus hardware/robotics (including consumer electronics and embodied intelligence), and AI plus science (AI4S). The article reviews cases such as investments in Horizon Robotics' Yu Kai, Manycore's Huang Xiaohuang, and Agile Robots' Chen Zhaopeng, and also acknowledges the lesson that its investments in the SaaS sector were "almost a complete wipeout."
Yang Jun, a partner at Linear Capital, held a nearly 2-hour live Q&A with nearly 30 students from the University of Pennsylvania, sharing his experience from pursuing a PhD to founding a startup to investing, as well as his views on "early retirement," career choices, judging startup teams, and opportunities in mature markets. He advises that career choices follow passion and growth, and believes early retirement can be boring; Linear Capital focuses on seed to Series A, pays attention to technology-matching issues, judges teams by capability, willingness, and resilience, and cites Agile Robots as an example showing that technology that solves pain points can bring opportunities.
Zheng Can, Managing Director at Linear Capital, said at the WAVES New Wave 2025 roundtable and in an interview that AI application opportunities belong to teams with both obsession and execution capability. Linear is bullish on agents that solve specific vertical problems, coding tools, voice models, and AI plus the silver economy.
Morado Ventures partners Ash and Mike, in a conversation with editor-in-chief Russ Rizzo, share their seed-stage investment logic, saying that falling costs of AI, machine learning, sensors, and edge computing are opening new opportunities, and that for early-stage investing "now" means three to five years out. The two note that rentable GPUs in the cloud have sharply lowered the cost of machine learning at scale, and their portfolio includes autonomous-device and self-driving companies such as Everest Labs, Canvas, and Zipline.