Manycore shares surge 140% in Hong Kong IPO as Chinese AI firm bets on spatial intelligence

Nvidia Alum Rides China's Robotics Wave to $150 Million Debut

Manycore Tech Inc. built a billion-dollar valuation in China's once-sizzling real estate market. Now, the software unicorn is betting on robotics and AI for its second act. The Hangzhou-based company is pushing to sell AI services based on the vast pools of 3D data derived from its popular interior design tool, wooing investors to an oversubscribed Hong Kong debut on Friday that raised $156 millionBloomberg Terminal. For co-founder Huang Xiaohuang, the listing is something of a rebirth. Manycore still makes the bulk of its revenue from its Kujiale home renovation assistant, which Huang developed a decade ago after working at Nvidia Corp., but he's now pivoting the business toward deals with robot makers and AI developers. "Robotics will define this era -- the sector is poised to be the next real estate," 41-year-old Huang, who also goes by Victor, said in an interview from his Hangzhou office. "It won't simply be a hardware play. Every device is set to become intelligent." Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Manycore is pivoting after Beijing introduced a slew of measures to cool an overheated property market -- stalling growth at a core business closely linked to home purchases. But in AI, it faces fresh challenges. Like the biggest names in software-as-a-service, Huang is worried about the existential threat posed by generative artificial intelligence. Salesforce Inc. and Adobe Inc. have unveiled sweeping corporate and product overhauls to fend off AI rivals. That pressure and Beijing's fresh regulatory scrutiny over offshore firms raising capital in Hong Kong have forced Manycore to settle for a fraction of the debut it envisioned five years ago, when it unveiled plans for a $500 million share sale in the US. Manycore has struggled to capture the explosive growth of newer AI upstarts. Revenue grew 8.6% to 820 million yuan ($120 million) last year, while gross margin expanded to 82%, according to its prospectus. The firm remains in the red as it continues to spend heavily on product development and sales and marketing. Huang founded Manycore alongside Chief Executive Officer Chen Hang and tech boss Zhu Hao, who were among the first US-educated engineers to return to China. After launching Kujiale in 2013, the firm tapped into the country's then-booming property market, impressing venture powerhouses like IDG Capital and Granite Asia, formerly the Asia operations of GGV Capital, with their strong subscription revenue. "There was no direct comparable for Manycore when we first looked at it," said Granite Asia senior managing partner Ji-Xun Foo, who backed the startup as early as 2014. "It's a bet on its underlying technology and the long-term upside." Eventually, Huang launched an in-house research lab that would leverage the company's 3D data to train AI models, recruiting 60 algorithm and data scientists to delve even deeper into spatial intelligence. The resulting models -- SpatialLM and SpatialGen -- now power generative 3D features for Kujiale and its global offering, Coohom, which generated 9% of total sales last year. Manycore is also targeting e-commerce sellers as well as China's booming short-form drama sector. Huang said he is pivoting Manycore toward physical or embodied AI, selling data to train robots for clients including Agibot. He wants the company to earn half its revenue from additional compute usage, an ambitious rise from its current level of 10%, with the rest coming from software subscriptions. Manycore is the first to list among Hangzhou's "Six Little Dragons," a premier startup cohort that includes AI powerhouse DeepSeek, humanoid robot maker Unitree and Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science. "We've been in the startup game for a long time, and it's always a race of speed," Huang said. "Your only option is to keep finding ways to accelerate."

Manycore, the first of the Hangzhou 'Little Dragons' to go public, pushes 'spatial intelligence' as the next wave of AI development | Fortune

Hong Kong's AI IPO boom produces its latest entrant today, as design AI startup Manycore Tech begins trading after seeking up to 1.02 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in funding, becoming the first of China's six celebrated "Little Dragons" from Hangzhou to reach public markets. "The IPO is important for us to attract the most talented engineers to join us, to buy more GPUs, and to collect more data," Victor Huang, Manycore's chair and one of its cofounders, told Fortune ahead of the trading debut. The Hangzhou-based startup is a bet on "spatial intelligence," moving beyond the word- and language-based work of large language models like OpenAI's GPT and DeepSeek's V3 to instead create AI models that can autonomously work in the real world. These programs, also called "world models," are key to operations like robotics and autonomous driving, where machinery has to react to external stimuli, like how a robotaxi needs to slow down in response to changing traffic conditions. Huang described spatial intelligence as similar to a person or animal's innate ability to understand the world around them. "When you enter a room, you can understand where you are and what's in front of you. And if you want to take a seat, you can understand which seat is empty," he explained. "People are now trying to apply AI in the physical dimension," Jixun Foo, senior managing partner at the Singapore-based venture capital firm Granite Asia, and an early backer of Manycore, said. He pointed out that viral videos of humanoid robots dancing, while impressive, are often carrying out pre-programmed routines. "If you want a different performance you have to program it again. You can't just tell the robot to do this or that action." Some of AI's biggest names are also working on "world models." Both ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li and former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun see these models as the next step in AI development. LeCun has argued that video data can help train world models, but Manycore and Huang instead think the startup's vast repository of 3D assets will be a more useful data set. "I don't believe that if you have enough video, you can train the rules of the physical world," Huang said. Instead, "we'd accumulated a huge amount of 3D data, almost 500 million assets from the real world. We had the training data, so we believed we could make the best physical AI in the world," he argued. China's AI sector has released many of its models on an open-source basis, which has helped to boost the reputation of its AI startups and won converts in the global tech sector, including in Silicon Valley. "People try Chinese AI. It's free. It's open-source. And when they try it, it's great," Huang explained. Manycore has already released several open-source models, including SpatialLM, a spatial language model that can understand and generate 3D environments, and SpatialGen. Still, in recent weeks, some tech companies, like Alibaba and Knowledge Atlas, better known as Z.ai, have started to release models on a proprietary basis, at least in the initial stages, as monetizing AI work has proved tricky for Chinese companies. But Foo thinks a company like Manycore can preserve its edge even if it open-sources its models. "For Manycore, it's not just about their model, but also the data set they have built. That dataset is unique to them, right? If you have a competitive edge that you can hold on to, then you can open-source something," Foo said. Manycore, founded in 2011, is one of the "Six Little Dragons," an informal group of six tech and AI startups based in Hangzhou, now one of China's leading AI hubs. Manycore is the first of the "dragons" to tap public markets; Unitree, the buzzy robotics manufacturer, will list on Shanghai's stock exchange later this year. The company got its start as a design software business, building Kujiale, a platform that lets users create 3D renders of interior spaces, and its international counterpart Coohom, which now serves customers in more than 200 countries. IDG Capital and Hillhouse Investment are among its previous backers. Huang was an engineer on Nvidia's CUDA team before returning to China to build a business around rendering. "The economy in the U.S. wasn't doing well at the time, but in China, real estate was booming," he recalled. That work helped convince Foo, who spent time at HP, to back the company. "I used to use a lot of 3D software when I was designing HP printers," Foo explained. "And I thought this was pretty cool: I was using it for mechanical products, and now they are doing it for a physical world." According to its IPO prospectus, Manycore generated 820 million Chinese yuan ($120 million) in revenue last year, growing by 8.6% from the previous year. It also earned a slim operating profit of 18.6 million yuan ($2.7 million), even as it posted an overall net loss of 428 million yuan ($62.8 million). China's real estate market is still in the throes of a prolonged slump, which Foo admits is a "headwind" for Manycore. Still, the company is expanding into international markets. "What gives me comfort is the resilience of the team. They stuck in there, and they figured things out." Design companies have been hit hard in recent months; shares in Adobe and Figma have plunged as AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic work design tools into their models. Some design startups are reinventing themselves as AI companies: Canva on Thursday launched a new suite of agentic offerings on Thursday that allow users to automate much of the design process. This isn't Manycore's first attempt at public markets. The company was on track for a U.S. listing in 2021, before withdrawing its application after Beijing regulators scrutinized Didi Global's U.S. IPO and forced the ride-hailing giant to delist, unnerving other Chinese companies considering U.S. listings. "Nowadays, the Hong Kong market is the best for a Chinese AI company," Huang says. Manycore is just the latest AI IPO to hit Hong Kong's market this year. AI and AI-related companies have led to a surge in debuts in the Chinese city, with listings raising almost $14 billion in the first quarter of the year. Some shares have surged by eye-popping amounts: MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas, two AI model developers, have risen by around 450% and 650% respectively since their early January IPOs. More IPOs are on the way. Victory Giant, which makes printed circuit boards, hopes to raise $2.2 billion in its IPO; its shares will debut on April 21. Other startups reportedly considering IPOs are Kimi developer Moonshot AI and smart glasses manufacturer Rokid. Bonnie Chan, CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, pushed back at this week's HSBC Global Investment Summit against the characterisation of the market as simply a conduit for Chinese capital. "When people say that Hong Kong's stock exchange is just hosting Chinese companies, it's not doing those companies justice," she said, noting that around 40% of companies that listed in Hong Kong last year generated more than half their revenue from non-Chinese sources. "I call them Chinese MNCs. They're very international." China's AI sector has been under fresh scrutiny from global investors since early last year, when DeepSeek -- another of Hangzhou's "Little Dragons" -- released its powerful and surprisingly efficient models, changing the conversation about Chinese innovation. Physical AI, in particular, is emerging as a Chinese strength. The country's dense manufacturing ecosystem can produce robots, sensors, and advanced components at a cost below rivals in other countries. Heavy investment in the electrical grid also allows China to rapidly expand the data centres needed to train large models. "It's not just a race on the foundational model," Foo said. "It's a race on the infrastructure. It's a race on compute. It's a race on energy." But Foo and Granite Asia, which was born from the Asia operations of former VC giant GGV Capital, aren't entirely focused on the Chinese market. "We are more pan-Asian," he explained. Earlier this year, Granite Asia partnered with DBS to launch a new $110 million fund to give the Southeast Asian bank's customers "early access" to IPO-stage companies in the region. "Our strategy is to be able to invest in companies early. We want to help them grow and scale outside of their home market," Foo says. "We have a good pipeline of companies going IPO."

Chinese AI firm Manycore shares rally over 100% in Hong Kong IPO By Investing.com

Investing.com-- Shares of Manycore Tech Inc rose sharply in their Hong Kong debut on Friday, after the Chinese spatial artificial intelligence firm clocked an oversubscribed IPO amid strong investor interest. Manycore shares rose as much as 171% from their initial offer price on their first day of trading, and were up about 140% at HK$18.40 by midday trade. Manycore had priced its shares at HK$7.62 and offered about 160.6 million shares. The company raised HK$1.22 billion ($160 million) gross in its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its IPO was oversubscribed some 1,591 times. Manycore listed under the ticker 0068. .Get more breaking news on China's top The company is the first among a group of high-profile, Hangzhou-based tech unicorns to publicly list, and joins a string of major Chinese AI IPOs this year. Manycore operates design platform Kujiale and specializes in AI-based rendering and 3D spatial data. The company also develops AI tools for interior design and physical space modelling. Chinese AI startups have clocked rosy valuations this year amid increasing optimism over the country's prospects in the fast-growing industry. Minimax and Zhipu (trading as Knowledge Atlas), two of China's so-called "AI Tigers," are trading up 147% and 566%, respectively, after strong Hong Kong market debuts in January.