Some parts of China are suffering from record high temperatures in the past few weeks, prompting local governments to halt industrial power use, including those of battery plants.
When news reaches the West, it generates fear-mongering headlines like “China heat wave shuts Tesla suppliers” which have likely rattled investors (because Tesla is all we care about, right?). But is the EV giant really suffering from China’s scorching heat?
First off, we need to look at which factories are affected. Lithium battery giant CATL is among the companies that have been ordered to shut down production in the landlocked province of Sichuan, according to a local media report. The pause, which lasts from August 15 to 20, is part of the province’s effort to ration electricity as it suffers from a devastating drought and heat wave.
While CATL, a major battery supplier to Tesla, might have trouble fulfilling some orders for customers, there’s no indication that Tesla is the one to bear the cost. For one, CATL has production plants all over China, from Guangdong, Jiangsu to Shanghai, so it’s unlikely that a temporary, regional rest — even though six days may seem long in the auto industry — will collapse the multi-billion business’ well-oiled supply chain.
Suppliers are also more likely to prioritize demand coming from Tesla because of its reputation and sheer volume. The American firm was the third-best-selling electric carmaker in China in the first half of 2021, according to an auto industry association.
“In China, Tesla enjoys a privilege just like Apple with all the manufacturers clamoring to be its suppliers. Even if production is restricted, it’s very likely that suppliers will prioritize Tesla’s orders while putting others’ on hold,” a Tesla parts supplier told TechCrunch.
The supply chains for Tesla and its local EV rivals like Xpeng and Nio are concentrated in manufacturing hubs around the Pearl River Delta, which include megacities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as well as the Yangtze Delta, which is home to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai and scores of chip makers around Suzhou, an employee at a Chinese EV startup pointed out to us.
Shanghai has been a victim of China’s recent heat wave, though there are no signs that the weather is stopping production at Gigafactory yet.
Shanghai already had its tough times in spring when a two-month-long COVID-19 outbreak forced Gigafactory to halt production twice.
Precisely due to these sporadic COVID-induced shutdowns over the past two years, “suppliers have become a lot more flexible,” the Tesla supplier said. “Many large manufacturers are stocking up on supplies to create a buffer for absorbing COVID shocks.”
Lastly, it’s worth noting that China is gathering steam to recover its sluggish economy at all costs. And it’s likely that industries that have been designated as the state planner’s top priorities, such as the EV sector, will receive more support when resources are limited.
As the heat wave tests the country’s ability to keep its manufacturing running, vice premier Hang Zheng highlighted “the importance of the energy and power supply for social and economic stability.”
“The country will also beef up policy support and take multi-pronged measures to help related enterprises address difficulties,” Han added.
Thanks to cross-border e-commerce platforms, China continues to be a major exporter of consumer goods for the world in the online shopping age. It’s not just marketplaces like Amazon and AliExpress that are enabling Chinese businesses to sell abroad. Behind the scene, a group of startups are making the software that allows exporters to more easily figure out what to sell and how to sell.
Dianxiaomi, roughly translated as ‘shop assistant’, is one of these ecommerce SaaS providers. The company just secured $110 million in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund II and Sequoia Capital China. Other prominent investors, including Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital, and Huaxing Growth Capital, also participated.
The financing lifts the company’s total investment to $210 million in 2022 alone.
Dianxiaomi is strategically located in Shenzhen, the capital of export-oriented ecommerce activity in China. The city that’s home to Huawei, Tencent, and DJI is also known to house the most Amazon sellers in the world.
Dianxiaomi started out with a convenient tool that allowed sellers to list their products already sold on Taobao, Alibaba’s marketplace for Chinese consumers, on Wish with “one click”, said its founder and CEO Du Jianyin, a former R&D engineer at Baidu, in an interview.
From there, Dianxiaomi went on to create a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for Chinese vendors on Wish, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Shopee, Lazada and the like. The target users are small and medium-sized sellers with 5,000 orders per day or less, the company told TechCrunch.
The SaaS provider itself is expanding overseas as well. It’s launched localized ERP products for sellers in Southeast Asia and Latin America, respectively. Globally, it claims to be serving 1.5 million users and has partnered with some 50 ecommerce platforms. In Southeast Asia, it has amassed 430,000 users that are selling within the booming region.
The company plans to open offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the U.K., where it looks to build a team of 20-100 staff to carry out customer service, operations, and other tasks in each country.
Landing in Southeast Asia is an obvious choice for many Chinese entrepreneurs, who see similar opportunities in the region as they did in their home market a decade ago.
“At its rapid growth rate, [Southeast Asia] is a bit like China from ten years ago. Second, the region is culturally similar with a big ethnically Chinese population, who can help promote the products. And third, orders from Southeast Asia have been growing at over 100% a year,” the CEO noted in the interview.
The financing for Dianxiaomi is one of the few deals that SoftBank has sealed this year in China, which for long was a major destination for the investment powerhouse. But amid a slowing economy and regulatory uncertainties, the company said last year that it would take a more “cautious” approach to backing Chinese startups.
In January, SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China injected funding into a similar venture called Shoplazza, a Canada- and Shenzhen-based company that powers direct-to-consumer brands with online store management tools.
There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles tech upstarts envision for the future, as they have been required to operate with a safety driver behind the wheel.
A set of provisions introduced by the Shenzhen government is bringing the industry one step closer to a driverless future. The “Silicon Valley of China” that’s home to the likes of Huawei, Tencent, and DJI is historically known for its progressive economic policies, so it’s unsurprising that the city just became the first in China to have laid out comprehensive rules governing smart and connected vehicles.
The regulation, which is set to take effect on August 1, grants permission for autonomous driving vehicles to operate without a human in the driver’s seat — though only within areas designated by the city’s authorities.
The rules also define the thorny issue of liability. When the vehicle is equipped with a driver, the driver will “be handled” by the transportation authorities in case of traffic rule violations and incidents. But if the car is completely driverless, the owner or manager of the self-driving vehicle is subject to handling by the authorities. If the accident is a result of a defect in the connected car, the owner or manager of the car can seek compensation from the manufacturer or vendor.
Driverless robotaxis have been allowed to operate in Beijing, the capital city where events often serve as the bellwether for the rest of the country, but the permission comes in the form of case-by-case “permits” rather than being officialized in regulations as is the case with Shenzhen.
Major autonomous driving players in China have all opted for a lidar-based route instead of one that relies purely on vision tech like Tesla. Meanwhile, passenger car manufacturers are in a race to equip their latest models with advanced driving assistance tech, which is also powered by lidar. Robo vans designed to ferry things inside industrial facilities are similarly equipped with lidar.
Demand from these various fields has been a boon to domestic lidar makers like Hesai, Robosense, Livox, Innovusion as well as foreign ones such as Ouster. Luminar, the Florida-based lidar company, recently snagged a strategic investment from Ecarx, a smart car platform started by China’s auto mogul Li Shufu, the founder of Geely, which is expected to help it secure more business in China and beyond.
There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles tech upstarts envision for the future, as they have been required to operate with a safety driver behind the wheel.
A set of provisions introduced by the Shenzhen government is bringing the industry one step closer to a driverless future. The “Silicon Valley of China” that’s home to the likes of Huawei, Tencent, and DJI is historically known for its progressive economic policies, so it’s unsurprising that the city just became the first in China to have laid out comprehensive rules governing smart and connected vehicles.
The regulation, which is set to take effect on August 1, grants permission for autonomous driving vehicles to operate without a human in the driver’s seat — though only within areas designated by the city’s authorities.
The rules also define the thorny issue of liability. When the vehicle is equipped with a driver, the driver will “be handled” by the transportation authorities in case of traffic rule violations and incidents. But if the car is completely driverless, the owner or manager of the self-driving vehicle is subject to handling by the authorities. If the accident is a result of a defect in the connected car, the owner or manager of the car can seek compensation from the manufacturer or vendor.
Driverless robotaxis have been allowed to operate in Beijing, the capital city where events often serve as the bellwether for the rest of the country, but the permission comes in the form of case-by-case “permits” rather than being officialized in regulations as is the case with Shenzhen.
Major autonomous driving players in China have all opted for a lidar-based route instead of one that relies purely on vision tech like Tesla. Meanwhile, passenger car manufacturers are in a race to equip their latest models with advanced driving assistance tech, which is also powered by lidar. Robo vans designed to ferry things inside industrial facilities are similarly equipped with lidar.
Demand from these various fields has been a boon to domestic lidar makers like Hesai, Robosense, Livox, Innovusion as well as foreign ones such as Ouster. Luminar, the Florida-based lidar company, recently snagged a strategic investment from Ecarx, a smart car platform started by China’s auto mogul Li Shufu, the founder of Geely, which is expected to help it secure more business in China and beyond.
Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant that has plowed money into AI and autonomous vehicle technology, unveiled Wednesday a new all-electric robotaxi that it plans to deploy at scale across China.
Baidu will add the Apollo RT6 EV – a cross between an SUV and a minivan that comes with a detachable steering wheel – to its Apollo Go ride-hailing service next year. The new battery-electric robotaxi is Baidu’s sixth-generation autonomous vehicle and the first model built on its Xinghe self-driving platform. The automaker said that developing the battery-electric architecture in-house helped trim production costs to a manageable $37,000 per unit.
Baidu said that recent advances in manufacturing have cut production costs, allowing it to eventually build and operate tens of thousands of robotaxis at scale across Chinese mega-cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen by next year.
“This massive cost reduction will enable us to deploy tens of thousands of AVs across China,” Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO and co-founder, said at the Baidu World 2022 technology conference. “We are moving towards a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a taxi today.”
Apollo RT6
The RT6 seats between two and four passengers. A detachable steering wheel adds space for “seating, vending machines, desktops, or gaming consoles,” the company said. The sunroof stretches the full length of the car to allow natural light into the cabin.
The Apollo RT6 comes with L4 autonomous driving capability that features 38 sensors – including a dozen cameras and eight LiDAR – for navigating complex streetscapes.
Baidu has not revealed how many miles it can travel on a fully charged battery.
The company also said Wednesday it has begun charging fares in Beijing for driverless rides in its fifth-generation robotaxis. The move allows Baidu to commercialize its robotaxi business, which it aims to expand beyond China to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030.
This story has been updated to clarify the timeframe for the RT6’s rollout across China.
Syrius Robotics, a Chinese startup that makes autonomous robots for warehouses, just secured 50 million yuan ($7.4 million) in a Series B funding round, lifting its total raised so far to $40 million.
The four-year-old company specializes in what’s called automated mobile robots (AMR), in contrast to some of its competitors that offer automated guided vehicles (AGV). In essence, AMRs are robots that can plan routes and react to circumstances in real time and are considered more advanced than AGVs, which follow pre-determined paths.
Think of Syrius’s robots as mini autonomous driving bots that can maneuver narrow warehouse aisles and lift and put away parcels. The company sees itself more as a software than hardware firm, with proprietary algorithms that tell robots how to move indoors.
Its latest round of funding is exclusively backed by Harvest Capital, a Chinese investment firm focused on technologies applied to traditional industries. Syrius raised capital in dollars — $20 million of it — as part of its Series B back in August, with TikTok parent ByteDance as a lead investor. The startup is also funded by Sequoia Capital China.
China’s warehouse robots have become investors’ darlings in the past two years, during which the COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures have stranded millions of workers. Shenzhen-based Hai Robotics, which makes casing handling robots, announced banking $200 million in September.
Like many robotics startups from China, Syrius has ventured abroad and derives half of its revenues from overseas markets. In Japan, where robots are addressing the labor shortage issue, it runs a subsidiary and has served trading house giant Mitsubishi Corporation and logistics firm Kantsu Co. The startup also has clients in Singapore and South Korea, and is looking to expand operations in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe.
Syrius appears to have the right founding team for its line of business. Its co-founder and CEO Jiang Chao was a leader of Project Tango, the mobile augmented reality project that Google initiated and later shut down; the other co-founder Luo Xuan worked on AMRs as a product management director at Alibaba Robotics, which should have given him much insight into the business considerations of Chinese e-commerce companies when it comes to investing in robots.
Based in Shenzhen and Beijing, Syrius employs 200 people and is profitable, it told TechCrunch, though the firm declined to disclose its revenues. Its source of income comes from selling robots, offering monthly robots-as-a-service subscriptions, and also making its Android-based operating system available to third-party robot makers, which allows the startup to expand beyond its familiar turf of e-commerce.
China’s Tesla challenger Xpeng isn’t content with just making electric vehicles. It’s also betting on ridable robot unicorns for kids.
Xpeng Robotics, a bionic robot maker affiliated with Xpeng, just raised an impressive $100 million in a Series A round led by IDG Capital, at a time when venture investments are slowing in China.
Other investors include Xpeng itself and some undisclosed backers. It’s unclear how much control Xpeng has over Xpeng Robotics following the latest round. But given their shared brand association, it won’t be surprising the two firms are closely tied up — at least on the development front. Technologies like autonomous driving that Xpeng has been working on are easily applicable to the robot business.
Indeed, as Xpeng’s chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng said in a statement:
“I also believe that in the future, manufacturers of smart cars will also be manufacturers of smart robots… As part of our mission as a technology innovator and explorer, we will continue to provide support to Xpeng Robotics.”
Xpeng Robotics calls itself an “ecosystem company” of Xpeng.
Founded in 2016, Xpeng Robotics’s first product is a quadruped robot that can navigate autonomously and interact with humans. In a 3D teaser revealed last September, the pony-like robot is seen nodding and blinking to a kid — and riding him around. In another video shot in real life, the pony is transporting snacks around an office in response to voice commands and trailing behind a human.
We’ve seen a variety of companion robots, like Shenzhen-based Elephant Robotics’ cutesy bionic cat, but few are of the size of Xpeng Robotics’s pony, which is as tall as a kid. One can imagine the R&D costs poured into finding a product-market fit for the quadruped robot and actually making it work.
Six years into operation, Xpeng Robotics still has not set a delivery date for its robots, though it said in its press release that it expects “intelligent robots to enter households in the next two years.” The project is clearly not something that can be undertaken by a scruffy startup without the backing from a deep-pocketed patron.
The funding will allow Xpeng Robotics to deepen its R&D investment in robotic hardware and software, hire “top-tier talent,” and accelerate product development and iteration.
The startup is headquartered in the global hardware hub Shenzhen with R&D centers in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Silicon Valley. It has over 300 employees to date, 80% of whom work in R&D.
Despite China’s sweeping bans on cryptocurrencies, domestic web3 talent is quietly flourishing, with many venturing beyond the country’s border.
From offering crypto derivative products to to making NFT games, Chinese web3 entrepreneurs’ footprint is far-reaching worldwide. We spoke to a dozen Chinese founders and investors to find out how this group is trying to build global web3 businesses while still keeping their roots in China and taking advantage of the home country’s abundant tech talent.
Many of them asked for anonymity. Some don’t want to draw the attention of the authorities because there are no clear rules around operating in China and serving overseas users, and others want to avoid being labeled “Chinese” at a time when China’s geopolitical tensions with the West run high.
Exploratory state
Many believe the current state of the internet, or web2, has become overly dominated by centralized, rent-seeking corporations like Google and Meta. Part of the appeal of web3 is to reclaim the internet through distributed ledger technologies like blockchain, which promises to bring greater decentralization and user ownership.
Cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens are two popular applications of blockchain that have attracted billions of dollars in investment, but they are far from the only use cases of the technology.
What China doesn’t want are cryptocurrencies’ crashing prices that have roiled the market in recent months. It appears to be encouraging a more controlled, centralized version of web3 — blockchain should be managed by trusted organizations rather than anonymous computers on the open web and bring productivity to areas that the government sees fit.
It is no surprise that China moved to outlaw initial coin offerings and crypto-based transactions for their financial risks, but there’s a grey area when it comes to other blockchain applications. While China has warned against the use of NFT as financial securities, it’s rebranding it as “digital collectibles,” which can only be bought using China’s fiat currency RMB, has little liquidity, and is tasked with promoting copyrights protection.
Some of China’s web3 developers are following the direction given at the top, joining in to build the infrastructure for digital collectibles. Other use cases have also gotten the government’s nod. Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Group, for example, has devised an array of blockchain services for purposes like using blockchain to verify court evidence and tracking food supply chains for safety.
Some argue that cryptocurrency, which is seen as a store of value, is like the bread and butter assets of web3. Without it, web3 won’t be able to operate at its fullest potential. Those in China who hold this view have largely turned their focus overseas, serving international users and raising funds from offshore institutions.
Abundant talent
Over the past few years, scores of Chinese web3 startups have moved their entities overseas in the wake of the country’s crypto crackdown, but they are not outright giving China up. They follow a playbook proven by previous generations of tech firms: domicile offshore, keep some operations in China, and go after foreign markets.
“Where else are you gonna find thousands of capable engineers?” says one China-based employee of a crypto exchange, asking not to be named.
China played a pivotal role in the blockchain industry’s early development, spawning a generation of crypto-savvy talent. Some of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, including Binance, FTX, KuCoin, Crypto.com, OKX, and Huobi, started out in the Greater China area. The world’s biggest crypto mining company Bitman was founded in Beijing. Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang was Ethereum’s first corporate investor and birthed the crypto investment powerhouse HashKey.
“There are seven million programmers here and they have proven again and again that they can innovate,” says Herbert Yang, general manager in Asia for Dfinity. The a16z-backed, Zurich-headquartered company came looking for projects in China that can be deployed on its blockchain network because the country offers “a great pool of tech talent.”
Other international organizations turn to China for the same reason. Ethereum Foundation, the organization behind the second-largest cryptocurrency, sponsored the “ETH Shanghai” hackathon to draw developers to its blockchain network. The virtual version of the event attracted nearly 1,000 developers this year, with an estimated 60% coming from China, according to the event’s organizer Mask Network, a startup bringing web3 functions to web2 platforms.
Chinese crypto firms moving overseas try to bring along their Chinese staff, but most of them resort to keeping some presence in China. While crypto-friendly countries like Singapore have policies for attracting foreign talent, local governments often set quotas to protect domestic employment. Employees with families in China are reluctant to relocate in the first place.
For web3 startups trying to hire in China over the last two years, the timing was ripe. Crypto value reached historic highs last year when China’s crackdown on its internet industry was well underway. Large-scale layoffs and slashed salaries prompted many workers from the likes of Tencent and Alibaba to seek out opportunities in the web3 frontier.
Others voluntarily quit their jobs at established tech firms to ride the web3 wave, either because they are lured by blockchain’s technological potential or the chance to accumulate wealth rapidly. Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, for instance, has lost dozens of its employees to web3 startups in recent months, TechCrunch learned.
Top product managers
It’s not news that tech outfits employ workers in China while serving international users. Zoom had hundreds of R&D staff in China before Western media reports questioned the security of its cross-data practices. Alibaba-owned Lazada and Shopee, Southeast Asia’s e-commerce foes, also keep significant operations in Shenzhen, an export and tech talent hub.
For many tech firms, China remains a desirable place to hire, thanks to a decade of breakneck growth and competition in its internet sector. Companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and TikTok owner ByteDance have earned recognition from Silicon Valley and beyond for innovation in their respective fields.
“Chinese-founded projects are great at managing and designing business-to-consumer products,” suggests a Chinese worker at a U.S.-based blockchain startup. “They are obsessed with data analytics and spend a lot of time finetuning products.”
China’s strength in web3 lies less in building blockchain’s underlying infrastructure but more in developing applications for users, reckoned several crypto investors and entrepreneurs.
“The early opportunities in web3 are in protocols [infrastructure for blockchain applications], but they are mostly solving transactions while user experience is overlooked,” says a Hong Kong-based blockchain startup founder.
“Chinese people are very good at building user experience. After all, China has birthed a robust web2 ecosystem,” he adds.
China’s tech workers are also known to be “hardworking,” reckons Curt Shi, an early investor in the move-to-earn app StepN and a partner at Prodigital Future Fund, which looks for Chinese-founded web3 projects going global. While the overworking culture in China’s tech sector has drawn fire in recent years, others see it as the country’s advantage.
StepN, for example, is run by founders who emigrated from China to Australia. Like many entrepreneurs in the Chinese diaspora, it takes advantage of its original and adopted homes by keeping a small team in China as part of its international staff.
“That’s why it can have customer support 24/7 while many of its rivals can’t,” Shi says.
A cultural issue
Despite the strengths that Chinese-run web3 startups can potentially muster, they face similar challenges as their web2 predecessors.
TikTok, which has pioneered snappy video sharing, is arguably the only Chinese consumer internet platform that has achieved global success in recent years. Without a significant on-the-ground presence in foreign countries, TikTok took off early on thanks to its parent ByteDance’s algorithm-driven content discovery machine developed in Beijing.
But entrepreneurs’ cultural understanding becomes critical in web3. The industry is still in its infancy, meaning a company’s ability to tell convincing stories is key to onboarding early adopters. “Companies in web3 have to resonate with their users culturally,” says a Singapore-based founder of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) who is originally from China.
Web3, as its advocates say, is in many cases community-run. The technology undergirding blockchain has the idea of consensus built-in. DAOs, for example, execute decisions based on the collective consensus of their communities.
Chinese-founded web3 teams that lack the language ability to effectively convey their ideas or the understanding of other cultures may have a harder time winning users in new markets.
“I’ve seen Chinese companies with good products, but they don’t know how to talk to the international communities,” the DAO founder says. “Just having a good product isn’t enough anymore in web3.”
Biotech startup Meta Pharmaceuticals sets itself an ambitious goal as it secures its initial investment. The Shenzhen-based company, which sets out to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases with the help of artificial intelligence, has raised $15 million from its seed and pre-A rounds.
There is no lack of investor interest in companies applying machine learning to small-molecule drug discovery. New York-based Immunai picked up $215 million last year to create an “atlas” of the human immune system. Insilico from Hong Kong recently landed $60 million despite undergoing what the CEO dubbed a “biotech winter.”
Meta’s technology falls under the emerging field of immuno-metabolism, which studies the relationship between the historically distinct disciplines of immunology and metabolism. Drugs created using this new method are purported to regulate the immune system more effectively with fewer side effects. Originally from southwestern China, Meta’s co-founder and CEO Xu Ke graduated from Weill Cornell Medicine and conducted research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the top cancer hospitals in the US.
Meta is merely ten months old but is built off the back of an industry incumbent. It’s a project “incubated” by AI-assisted drug discovery and development upstart Xtalpi, which was founded in 2014 and has raised nearly $800 million in funding to date from the likes of Tencent, Softbank Vision Fund, and Sequoia Capital China.
Investors from Meta’s financing rounds included Xtalpi itself, Forcefield Ventures, IMO Venture, and Tiantu Capital.
Meta and Xtalpi clearly play complementary roles to each other by working to translate new drug targets into patents and marketable products. Meta’s proposed therapeutic targets will first go to XtalPi for drug discovery or de novo drug design, which refers to computer-assisted molecular design. Once a pre-clinical candidate is identified, Meta may take over to carry out subsequent development, investigational new drug (IND) filing, and clinical trials, an Xtalpi spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Meta claims to have already discovered a series of metabolic protease targets after sifting through thousands of proteases on its AI-enabled target discovery platform.
The startup is using public data for the initial training of its target discovery technology and plans to collect samples and omics data from patients and healthy donors in collaboration with hospitals in China down the road, Xu explained to TechCrunch.
“Our pipeline has the potential to be used for treating a wide range of autoimmune problems, cancer, and age-associated diseases,” Xu said when asked about competition. “It’s still too early to share the specifics just yet or limit ourselves to one or two existing drugs and indications.”
Headquartered inside an innovation free-trade zone in Shenzhen bordering Hong Kong, Meta plans to market its drugs globally. In its infancy, the zone is one of many government-led initiatives to promote technological collaboration between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Support for startups comes in various forms and in Meta’s case, it means tax exemption on imported lab equipment. The area is also home to Xtalpi and one of China’s largest autonomous driving startups Deeproute.ai.
Global venture firm SOSV is one of the most active investors in climate tech and — as a partner ofTechCrunch Sessions: Climate — you’re invited to attend theSOSV Climate Tech Meetup on June 13, from 6-9 pm at the Brower Center in downtown Berkeley. This event will feature teams from SOSV’s HAX (Hard tech: Newark and Shenzhen) and IndieBio (Life sciences: San Francisco and NYC) startup development programs.
Meetup tickets are just $20 for general admission and $5 for students. Register here.
Key players from HAX include Susan Schofer, partner and CSO, and Garrett Winther, partner. Key players from IndieBio include Pae Wu, general partner and CTO; Mohan Iyer, general partner; Alex Kopelyan and Parikshit Sharma, partners. To see SOSV’s top climate investments, check out the SOSV Climate Tech 100.
SOSV accepts deep tech, pre-seed companies into itsHAX andIndieBio programs and, in 4-6 month programs, it provides daily, 1:1, in-person, expert assistance to founders on the full technology spectrum including product and company-building challenges, as well as labs and fabrication facilities.SOSV‘s initial investment is $275-500K, andSOSV continues to invest through series seed, A and beyond. It also works closely with founders to bring in new investors long after the program ends.
Join theSOSV,HAX andIndieBio teams at the June 13 meetup for great networking opportunities over beer, wine and snacks.
TC Sessions: Climate 2022 takes place in person on June 14 at UC Berkley’s Zellerbach Hall with an online event on June 16. Literally hundreds of leading climate tech founders, investors and scientists will be in the house. Join them: Buy your pass today and save before prices go up at the door.
Registering for this meetup does not gain admission to the main conference on June 14 nor the online day on June 16.
