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While China’s rainmakers have been essential to the country’s great market opening, corruption concerns and a changing geopolitical balance have seen them pushed to the sidelines.
The likely impact of the US lender’s collapse is that China’s tech elite will look to banks in Hong Kong, Singapore and even Europe.
As it gets harder to tell a good China business story by just using terms that Western investors can understand, monitoring the latest policies and practices out of Beijing is increasingly essential.
- Total venture-capital investment in China in the first quarter fell 30 per cent quarter on quarter to US$11.5 billion
- China still leads Asia’s VC landscape, with eight of the 10 biggest deals in the first three months of the year
Across 16 sectors, artificial intelligence unicorns are the highest valued, at an average of US$6.76 billion, followed by financial technology firms at US$6.57 billion.
Baichuan, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax are amassing billions of yuan of funding from domestic tech giants, venture capitalists and state-backed investors.
Singapore-based Granite Asia plans to assemble a private-credit investing team as early as the second half of this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
With one of the most vibrant start-up ecosystems and fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia, Vietnam is poised to climb the global value chain – but challenges lie in wait.
Mainland China’s commercial and financial hub plans to set up a 100 billion yuan (US$13.8 billion) fund of funds focusing on key technology sectors to fire up the local economy.
The capital infusion brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic, whose other investors include Google, to US$4 billion.
Chinese companies seeking to expand overseas and Asian SMEs with ESG potential hold a lot of potential for private credit providers, ADM Capital founder Christopher Botsford says.
Moonshot AI’s updated Kimi chatbot can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, up from the previous 200,000 characters.
The capital infusion could be a harbinger for Huawei’s increased pace of new investments this year, as the Chinese tech giant’s sales rose in 2023.
After cutting costs by about 20 per cent throughout 2023, Hex Trust sees the cryptocurrency market’s revival ‘directly translating into profitability’ for the company.
M&A activity in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to bounce back by around 10 per cent in the second half of this year after a lacklustre 2023, with India and Japan likely to emerge as winners, EY’s Yew-Poh Mak tells the Post.
AIsphere, which has raised more than US$14 million in a round led by venture firm Fortune Capital, launched a beta version of its PixVerse video generator for domestic users on Monday.
GSR Ventures’ Allen Zhu sees the current investor interest generated by artificial intelligence start-ups that are building large language models as based on a ‘fear of missing out’.
Private equity firm CVC Capital Partners has closed its largest Asia fund to date, shrugging off a challenging macroeconomic environment that has put a dent in fundraising and led many global fund managers to cut their exposure to the region.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, was valued at about US$2.5 billion in its latest funding round.
Private markets firm HarbourVest sees investment opportunities in Asia driven by demand generated by China’s declining demographics and uptick in retail spending, as well as trends like the reshuffling of global supply chains.
House panel rues ‘decades of investment’ after investigation of GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Walden International.
Rokid deal comes as Chinese authorities increasingly step up as private equity investors in projects in line with local development strategies.
Aramco Ventures, a subsidiary of the world’s largest oil producer Saudi Aramco, will invest in a Chinese developer of diagnostic technology, pledging support for the start-up’s global ambitions.
‘Hyperlocality’ and open dialogue between regulators, businesses and investors, can help retain the vibrancy of Asia’s start-up ecosystem, industry leaders said at the FII Priority conference in Hong Kong.
The lack of funding over the past few months has forced businesses to cut costs and find quicker paths towards achieving profits, but parts of Asia are now experiencing a boom.
The online travel start-up, which became a unicorn in 2018, says it will use the newly raised capital to expand product offerings and boost AI adoption.
Innovations in synthetic biology and alternative materials can improve the lives and livelihoods of many people, says Horizons Ventures co-founder Solina Chau.
Decline in China VC deal activity follows several years of strict anti-pandemic curbs, a regulatory crackdown and rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
More than 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees signed a letter, calling for all board members to resign and for fired CEO Sam Altman to be reinstated.
Code-named Tigris, the project aimed to create an AI-focused chip company that could produce semiconductors rivalling those from Nvidia, sources say.
The start-up has decided to change the so-called tensor name of its AI model Yi-34B, following an inquiry that later revealed it was developed using the architecture of Meta Platforms’ Llama system.
