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.
Industry insiders believe bipedal humanoid robots have no practical value in the short term and are unlikely to be commercialized within ten years: Xiaomi's CyberOne "Tieda" costs about 600,000 to 700,000 yuan per unit and cannot be mass-produced, and Boston Dynamics has never intended to bring Atlas to market. Quadruped robot dogs are commercializing faster: Unitree's industry-grade quadruped robot dog has a payload of 160–200 jin, with annual sales of only a few thousand units; Xiaomi's CyberDog "Tiedan" is priced at 9,999 yuan, with 700 of the first 1,000 units sold in the Xiaomi community. China's robotics market is expected to reach $17.4 billion in 2022.
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.
At the 3rd China International Service Robot Innovation and Development Conference, Shi Wenhua, Vice President of Technology at Yunson Intelligent, presented a full-scenario intelligent service solution centered on AI service robots. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Red Star Macalline Holding, the company builds smart mall, smart building, and smart community solutions, supported by an integrated scheduling and management platform. It holds more than 100 related invention patents, and its products have been applied in scenarios such as mall shopping guidance, exhibition hall tours, and government services.
Qiu Qiang, CTO of Shenzhen Rubotics, said the company uses machine vision and robot motion planning technology to build an intelligent hand-eye unit, targeting the two major pain points of industrial robots: insufficient intelligence and high application costs. Its bathroom polishing unit can use 3D vision to detect the shape of a washbasin and automatically plan the working trajectory, shortening debugging time; the intelligent hand-eye unit can free 1 to 2 workers from hazardous environments. On February 1 this year, Rubotics signed a cooperation agreement with Japan's RBB company, beginning its "going global" push.
OFweek Robotics interviewed Liang Jintang, Marketing Director of QKM Technology, to explain the reasons behind the collective rise in robotics companies' performance in 2020. He noted that the pandemic prevented workers from returning to their posts and strengthened companies' willingness to undertake automation upgrades, which, combined with overseas orders flowing back to China, left the company's factory with a full order book and supply falling short of demand. QKM Technology positions itself as a manufacturer of lightweight industrial robot bodies and has developed a lineup of 9 major series and 30 models, covering SCARA, Delta, and six-axis robots.
Youibot Deputy General Manager Zheng Hao believes the AGV market still has enormous room for growth: from 2014 to 2019, domestic AGV output rose from 3,200 units to 33,400 units, and sales scale grew from 700 million yuan to 6.175 billion yuan, with high-end manufacturing and deep cultivation of niche industries as the main drivers.