Tsinghua alumni are appearing in great numbers.
On August 6th, the "X-Day" Xili Lake Demo Event's Tsinghua Alumni Electronics & Information Special Session and the first anniversary of the South Tsinghua Public Welfare Demo were held in Nanshan, Shenzhen. Six projects took the stage, spanning chips, materials, AI, healthcare, and other fields.
One still remembers a year ago, when a batch of Tsinghua startup projects were unveiled collectively at Shenzhen's Xili Lake. Later, among them, Transcendence Intelligent (夸维智能), which emerged from the pack, recently completed a Series B financing of 10 billion RMB, with its valuation surpassing 100 billion RMB; Zero Dimension (零次方), after 18 months of establishment, completed 4 rounds of financing, with orders exceeding 100 million RMB.
Time passes, but Xili Lake always sees new faces taking the stage, and people continually move from here into the broader depths of industry.
A Group of Tsinghua Faction Appears in Shenzhen
The first to take the stage that day was Zhichen Semiconductor (智辰半导体).
This Shenzhen-headquartered company is dedicated to building a new paradigm edge AI chip platform. Founder Wang Xiaobin is a chip veteran with nearly 30 years of industry experience, having worked long-term at HiSilicon (Huawei), participating in the R&D and commercialization of multiple generations of the Kirin mobile phone chips.
Zhichen Semiconductor judges that as models continue to grow larger, more AI tasks will run locally, placing new demands on chip power consumption, storage capacity, and cost. The company is thus building the T-series edge AI chips, planning to enter scenarios like PCs, robotics, automotive, and edge servers.
The next to appear was Lightspeed Evolution (光速进化), which brought AI into the home.
Founder Li Shaozhang is a Tsinghua Computer Science alumnus with 20 years of experience in the smart hardware industry, having worked at TP-Link, 360, Meituan, and Lexar. In 2025, he started a new venture, founding Lightspeed Evolution.
The company's first product targets home security, using edge visual language models and local AI computing power to enable devices to recognize family members, strangers, pets, vehicles, and abnormal behavior, and supports functions like fall detection and safety protection.
Qingli Technology (清力技术) was founded by Academician Zheng Quanshui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a professor at Tsinghua University. For over 20 years, Zheng Quanshui has been researching "self-superlubricity" technology – in simple terms, achieving extremely low friction and wear when two solid surfaces slide in contact without lubricant.
Qingli Technology was officially established in 2019. Today, leveraging the "zero-wear" advantage of self-superlubricity technology, it adopts a "self-superlubricity + X" model, focusing on core technological pain points in national strategic industries and future potential tracks. It has successfully developed products like MEMS RF switches, micro-generators, and special micro-motors, and has secured small-batch orders, accelerating the provision of breakthrough solutions for fields like humanoid robots, AI computing chip testing, and 6G communication.
Later, a Tsinghua Ph.D. brought a chip design Agent. Wang Jiacheng, CEO of ShuYu Technology (枢宇科技), holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Information from Tsinghua. The company starts with analog chips – a category with a vast number of SKUs, where different application scenarios often require redesign, creating high demand for experienced analog chip engineers.
ShuYu Technology hopes to use an AI Agent to undertake part of this design work. Its core product, Orvix Pilot, uses a self-developed multi-agent framework to connect the entire circuit design process from specification input, topology generation, parameter optimization to simulation verification. It is delivered in a software-hardware integrated machine form purely for intranet use, ensuring zero data leaves the enterprise.
Heyi Intelligent Control (合一智控) grew out of the Research Center for Building Space Edge Autonomous Control at the Shenzhen Tsinghua Research Institute. The team is developing a spatial intelligence agent based on spatial perception and AI decision-making, aiming to enable buildings to perceive occupants, environment, and equipment status, and then automatically perform corresponding control.
Currently, the company's systems have entered over 200 projects, covering an area of more than one million square meters. According to the company's on-site disclosure, real-world projects have generally achieved over 20% energy savings.
The last company, ShengShengYi (生生易), brought AI into assisted reproduction. Dedicated to improving clinical decision-making, laboratory safety, and operational efficiency in fertility centers through AI software and smart medical devices, ShengShengYi has formed a product portfolio including AI embryo assessment, intelligent liquid nitrogen storage monitoring, egg retrieval vacuum pumps, and AI incubators.
Currently, the company holds two Class II National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) registrations, US FDA 510(k) clearance, and certifications for ISO 13485 and ISO 9001 quality management systems. Its products and collaborations have covered markets in China, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, continuously promoting original Chinese reproductive medicine AI technology to go global.
The six companies are at different stages of progress, yet they constitute the most authentic cross-section of Chinese technology innovation today: hard-tech startups are moving closer and closer to the source of scientific research.
From Tsinghua Garden to Xili Lake
These projects share a similar starting point: they all hail from Tsinghua.
A year ago, the first "X-Day" Tsinghua Alumni Project Special Session was held at Xili Lake, bringing together 21 Tsinghua hard-tech companies and simultaneously kicking off the first stop of the South Tsinghua Public Welfare Demo. Now, new entrepreneurial teams continue to emerge, and some projects that appeared at that time have progressed even further.
Why are Tsinghua startup projects appearing so densely here? One obvious change is that hard-tech investment is continuously extending its reach earlier. During the roundtable discussion that day, the topic most discussed by several investors was how to reach the source of technology sooner.
"This is the hottest half-year I have seen in my nearly 20-year career," said Du Yongbo, Managing Partner at Huaxing New Economy Fund, referring to the bustling scene in the venture capital circle this year.
Lin Haizhuo, Founding Partner of Zhuoyuan Asia, noted that investment is continuing to move earlier: many VC firms are entering the scientific research stage even while technological paths are still being explored. He summarized this phenomenon as the "academization" of technology investment.
Subtly, this has also changed how investment institutions find projects. "This poses more challenges for venture capital institutions, compelling us to follow the technology itself more closely and dig for projects beneath the surface," said Sui Jianfeng, General Manager of Leaguer Venture Capital. By the time a company truly enters the public eye, its financing may have already rapidly passed two or three rounds. Truly early-stage investment is moving towards professors, academic papers, and laboratories.
And Tsinghua happens to have a batch of such source projects, with electronic information being one of the densest areas. From chips and artificial intelligence to optoelectronics and smart hardware, a number of technical teams have left the laboratory and entered the stages of product definition, engineering, and commercial validation. Compared to mature companies, these projects are earlier, smaller, and also more reliant on industrial scenarios, supply chains, and the first pot of patient capital.
Over the past two years, the scale of early-stage hard-tech financing in Shenzhen has approached 280 billion RMB, with Tsinghua alumni startup projects accounting for nearly 30%; in key areas like chips, communications, and autonomous driving, the financing success rate of Tsinghua-faction projects is also significantly higher than the industry average.
Xu Ao, COO of Shuimu Nanguo Technology & Innovation (水木南国科创), introduced that the South Tsinghua Public Welfare Demo started from Nanshan a year ago, has held 17 sessions, serving 117 Tsinghua alumni startup projects. The next step will continue to link capital, industry, and policy resources, promoting more early-stage projects toward industrial implementation.
This path from universities to industry is gradually extending in Shenzhen's Nanshan District. Those entrepreneurial teams that once stood on the Xili Lake demo stage have successively grown into representative companies in their respective tracks.
To date, the "X-Day" Xili Lake Demo Club has held 19 themed demo events, cumulatively facilitating connections for about 4,500 institutions, with 58 enterprises obtaining equity financing exceeding 3.316 billion RMB. Transcendence Intelligent (跨维智能), which was on the demo stage last year, recently completed a 10 billion RMB Series B financing, with its valuation exceeding 100 billion RMB; the Tsinghua post-2000s team Zero Dimension (零次方), after 18 months of establishment, completed 4 rounds of financing, with orders exceeding 100 million RMB.
Batch after batch of projects meet at Xili Lake, and from there, they head towards more distant horizons.
This article is from WeChat Official Account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Wang Lu
