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{调取该文章的TAG关键词}|When will China have its own NVIDIA?( 三 )


In March this year, Birentech, co-founded by the former president of SenseTime, completed its series B round financing. Since its founding in September 2019, Birentech had raised RMB4.7 billion in total. Its investors include Hillhouse, Meridian Capital, Ping’an China, China Merchants Capital, and BAI Capital, etc. The company is currently valued at over RMB10 billion, viewed as one of the emerging unicorns in the semiconductor industry.
Besides Birentech, companies that have entered the GPU sector such as Metax-Tech and Moore Threads have all completed their respective financing.
It is worth noting that Birentech, Moore-Threads, and Metax-Tech have not yet come up with actual products yet. None of the companies had completed a production line trial operation for their first chip when they were seeking financing.
Why investors were willing to pour money into startups that have no actual product yet? These companies were able to receive financing because investors generally make investment decisions based on the startup teams and the sector they focus on during the startup’s early phase, several investors told TMTPost. Birentech, Moore-Threads, and Metax-Tech’s management teams all consist of industry veterans who had formerly worked for the top three chip makers in the U.S., while they all focus on the emerging AI chip sector.
“We need to give these companies some patience and opportunities. I don’t believe everyone in the company all works on writing concepts and business plans on PPT. Chip development generally takes five or even ten years. We are not being stupid or opportunistic when we poured money into these companies. In my opinion, investing in the semiconductor sector itself is very risky. So we should already know this is a long-term investment and we need to be ready to take on the high risks. This is very different from investing in the Internet industry,” the investors told TMTPost.
However, an investor specialized in the semiconductor industry pointed out that the investment activities that we have mentioned above fundamentally seek to profit from the increase of the valuation of these companies. When the chip industry is hyped up, venture capital firms will invest in GPU and AI makers that are still in their early phase and expect to gain a higher return as their valuation goes up.
The core members of these startup teams all came from the top three chip makers in the U.S. For instance, Zheng Jinshan, the chief scientist of Iluvatar CoreX, was the chief technical expert of AMD, while the founding team of Metax-Tech mainly consists of former AMD veterans as well.
AMD is the second-biggest chip maker in the GPU sector, according to Zhang. AMD’s GPU development team is based in Shanghai and its image rendering team is headquartered in the U.S. Without a doubt, AMD and NVIDIA’s employees are the best of the best in the semiconductor industry.
Yan Guihai, founder and CEO of Chinese chipmaker YUSUR, believes that Chinese companies should serve local businesses in application first and highlight their agility in product development. This means that Chinese companies will have chances to outcompete chip giants such as NVIDIA in defining products and solution development cycle, Yan said. According to Yan’s prediction, there will be a group of GPU and DPU companies in China possessing cutting-edge technologies.
“The chip industry has five components: design, manufacture, assembly and test, material, and EDA. Design is the component that is most related to application. And application is our biggest strength. Therefore we have a lot of opportunities in achieving breakthroughs in design. Then we can trickle down the advantages we gained and catch up with our competition. We need to tap into the emerging sector and make our advances there. There is hope for us to witness the rise of a group of companies with cutting-edge technologies, solid products, and strategic thinking in ten years.” Yan told TMTPost.                                                                

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