Linear Capital released quarterly progress updates from its portfolio companies, covering four categories: funding, products, partnerships, and industry recognition. On funding: D-Robotics completed a $100 million Series A, Tashi Zhihang completed a $122 million angel+ round, White Rhino completed a 200 million yuan Series B led by SF Express, and Weiwo completed over $60 million in C1/C2 funding.
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.
More than ten Linear Capital portfolio companies exhibited at WAIC 2025. Rokid Glasses reached sales of 300,000 units, and Manycore Tech released the InteriorGS dataset containing 1,000 3D Gaussian semantic scenes. D-Robotics' RDK S100x and the Qinglong robot demonstrated voice-controlled grasping on site, and White Rhino's R3 unmanned vehicle has been approved for a road testing permit in Pudong New Area. Ling Universe's AI learning companion Xiaofangji went on sale on JD.com at the end of May, and Lingshu Intelligence's ship material management case was selected as a 2024 AI innovation practice case by China State Shipbuilding Corporation.
The Jiangsu Embodied Intelligent Robot Industry Alliance was established in Nanjing, and Estun Cobot was elected as its first vice-chair unit. During a tour of the exhibition, Governor Xu Kunlin and other officials interacted with the humanoid robot Codroid 02. Codroid 02 stands 170 cm tall, is equipped with self-developed integrated joint modules, has 31 degrees of freedom (excluding dexterous hands), and a single-arm payload of 5 kg. It uses a dual-system architecture combining a vision-language large model with a flow matching strategy, and demonstrated dynamic walking and fine manipulation on site. It is planned for future use in automotive final assembly, electronics assembly, logistics, and other industries.
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.
Figure AI released progress on Helix's capabilities after three months of deployment in a logistics environment: per-item processing time fell from about 5.0 seconds to 4.05 seconds, barcode scanning success rate rose from about 70% to about 95%, and the system gained the ability to handle flexible packages such as poly bags and flat envelopes.
Why it matters: The original article provides the data scale and ablation experiment details for each architecture module, allowing readers to understand the specific sources of the logistics performance improvement.
Linear Capital founder and CEO Wang Huai appeared with multiple portfolio companies at BEYOND EXPO 2025, sharing AI investment experience at two forums, the International Investment and Financing Summit and the Artificial Intelligence Summit. Products from its portfolio companies Rokid, Wance Technologies, and Bool Vector were selected for the BEYOND BEST CHOICE Awards and the BEYOND Innovation Awards.
Linear Capital portfolio companies Manycore Tech and Rokid appeared at the 21st J.P. Morgan Global China Summit. Manycore Tech co-founder and chairman Huang Xiaohuang took part in the roundtable discussion "AI: The Power of Innovation," and Rokid founder and CEO Zhu Mingming gave a keynote titled "AI+AR, Exploring Human-Computer Interaction Products."
On May 27, DEEP Robotics and Fluke China signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Hangzhou to jointly explore autonomous inspection solutions using quadruped robots equipped with online acoustic imagers, namely the DEEP Robotics X30 quadruped robot carrying the Fluke SV600 online acoustic imager, which can replace inspection personnel in entering confined spaces or hazardous environments for inspection, with applications in power partial discharge inspection, gas leak detection at industrial sites, and other fields. The two parties have carried out in-depth integrated technology cooperation since 2023 and have already won orders from internationally renowned enterprises.
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.