Moore Threads Funding Story: Early Investors' Returns Exceed 6200 Times

Authors: Wang Manhua, Chen Mei

1572157288The fastest approval rate on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, the most expensive "100-yuan stock" this year... With a series of numbers being refreshed, Moore Threads, known as "China's Nvidia", officially landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board today. On the market, Moore Threads opened at a high of 688 yuan per share, a 502% increase from its issue price of 114.28 yuan per share. As of press time, the company's market capitalization was 280 billion yuan. Looking back at Moore Threads' financing history, the company has attracted much attention from capital since its inception, quickly becoming a "collective consensus" in the primary market—it completed two rounds of financing just three months after its establishment in 2020, and then steadily advanced at a pace of one round per year, with a cumulative financing scale of over 10 billion yuan, and as many as 86 shareholders before its IPO. As one of the earliest investors, Peixian Qianyao, roughly calculated based on its latest market capitalization of 280 billion yuan, has seen its initial investment of 1.9 million yuan grow to approximately 11.898 billion yuan, a return of over 6262 times. Of course, the story of Moore Threads' financing also includes some regrets of missed opportunities. Earlier this year, China Venture Capital Network reported on an investor who missed out on investing in Moore Threads' existing shares because he couldn't raise 10 million yuan within a day. From the frenzied bidding wars in early-stage financing to the fierce competition for market share before its IPO, the capital competition surrounding Moore Threads over the past five years has not only witnessed the rapid growth of China's semiconductor industry but also reaffirmed a profound truth: on the road to breakthroughs in core technologies, the most expensive cost is often not money, but the opportunity cost incurred due to hesitation. So, amidst the wave of investment in hard technology, what qualities does this company possess that allow it to weather economic cycles and become a core asset that capital is unwilling to relinquish? What industry judgments and value commitments lie behind those seemingly "risky bets"? With these questions in mind, let's revisit how the "first domestically produced GPU stock" came to be. "A High Starting Point" in 2020 The year Moore's Threads was born coincided with the peak of China's GPU industry, with companies like Suiyuan Technology and Biren Technology entering the market, and the capital market's enthusiasm for the semiconductor sector reaching unprecedented heights. Despite facing numerous competitors, Moore Threads, touted as "China's Nvidia," had a stunning start—completing two rounds of financing within 3 months and achieving a valuation exceeding 10 billion RMB in less than 10 days. The company raised $100 million, breaking the industry record for the fastest company to become a unicorn that year. The company's first round of financing occurred in September 2020, with investors including Peixian Qianyao and Shenzhen Minghao. Regarding this investment, my colleague, Mr. Yang Boyu, once mentioned that Zhou Qi, one of the shareholders of Peixian Qianyao, has a deep connection with the long-established graphics card manufacturer Colorful, and is an individual investor in its affiliated companies. Colorful began collaborating with NVIDIA as early as 2000, and became a core AIC partner of NVIDIA in 2010. A key detail in this round of financing is that Shenzhen Minghao's entry was facilitated by Peixian Qianyao. As the earliest external investor, Peixian Qianyao thus received a preferential price for its registered capital—based on a pre-investment valuation of 10 million yuan, and invested 1.9 million yuan. Looking back now, this 1.9 million yuan "vote of confidence" has yielded a rich return. The prospectus shows that before the listing, Peixian Qianyao still held 16.9987 million shares of Moore Threads, representing 4.2494% of the shares (pre-IPO). Based on the latest market capitalization of 280 billion yuan before publication, its shareholding was valued at 11.898 billion yuan, a 6262-fold increase. If Moore Threads' first round of financing still had a "familiar connections" element, then the subsequent angel round of financing was more in line with the standard narrative of a star project. In December 2020, Moore Threads completed its angel round of financing, with investors including leading institutions such as 5Y Capital, Sequoia China, Wenming Investment, and H&T. One investor recalled that when this round of financing was finalized, Moore Threads didn't even have a prototype machine; what impressed these leading institutions was its impeccable team configuration. Zhang Jianzhong, the founder of Moore Threads, was once an important "deputy" of Huang Renxun. Starting in 2006, he became NVIDIA's Global Vice President and General Manager of China, leading the team to establish a complete GPU ecosystem in China and making Greater China NVIDIA's most important GPU region globally. The market has witnessed the entire transformation of the GPU industry, from graphics processing to neural network acceleration.

The team behind him is also star-studded - the core members are all from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel、AMD

2021Year2Month, the company completedPre-A2006year4Month to2020Year9monthly termsThe high valuation was questioned due to the company's net profit performance, but the team, based on their strong optimism about its prospects, believed the price was still within a reasonable range, successfully persuading investors, and ultimately obtaining quick approval and timely payment.

The market also rewarded these decisive investors. According to investors close to Moore Threads, in Pre-A and Series A funding rounds, institutions that failed to make timely payments experienced valuation increases in the same round. Following this, in the Series B funding round led by China Mobile Digital New Economy Industry Fund and Harmony Health Insurance, its pre-investment valuation was pushed to a high of 22.5 billion yuan, compared to the Pre-A round. The valuation jumped significantly to 3.7 billion. Looking back at this investment four years ago, Zheng Yan stated that Moore Threads has consistently exceeded his expectations in terms of company development. According to the initial plan, the company aimed to launch one chip every one to one and a half years, and complete three chips in four years. However, in actual progress, R&D efficiency improved significantly: the first chip was delivered on time, and the iteration speed of the subsequent two chips was further accelerated, achieving a leapfrog progress of "three chips in three years." Even more surprising was the quality of the product launches. At the end of 2022, Moore Threads held its autumn launch event, introducing the industry's first domestically produced graphics card, the MTT S80, as well as the Meta Computing All-in-One PC, the MCCX series, and GPUs. The software stack and application tools broke the industry's then-prevailing pattern of "only showcasing chips but not applications." Subsequently, its self-developed graphics card was launched on JD.com at a price of 2999 yuan, making it one of the few domestic chip companies capable of achieving end-to-end AI deployment. Zheng Yan stated that this means ordinary gamers, investment institutions, competitors, and even overseas users can obtain Moore's Threads' chip products, demonstrating the team's absolute confidence in its technology. During post-investment tracking, Zheng Yan's team discovered that Moore Threads' R&D milestones were precisely controlled to the point that "the time deviation for achieving key project R&D milestones did not exceed one month." Even more surprisingly, the AI ​​functionality was implemented ahead of schedule: In the initial planning, the company intended to focus on graphics and image processing first, and then enter the AI ​​field later. However, the actual AI functionality was integrated into the product line a generation ahead of schedule, further expanding the market's imagination. According to the prospectus, as of 2023, the company achieved hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue, validating its commercial monetization capabilities. Among them, Moore Threads' revenue in 2023 was 124 million yuan, compared to 046 million yuan in 2022, representing a year-on-year increase of 124 million yuan. leaf="">169%。

“ChinaGPUDoes not have a darkest hour"

Looking back at the growth trajectory of Moore's Threads, it has never lacked dramatic twists and turns. 2023 was a pivotal year for both companies and investors. On October 17, 2023, the United States added Moore's Threads to its Entity List. Coupled with its new regulations on integrated circuit computing power density and bandwidth density, multiple pressures are aimed directly at this rapidly growing Chinese company. AI chip company faces its most severe test since its inception.

"Unforgettable."InvestorAThis is how to describe the feeling of that day,"A. In his letter, he emphasized: "China does not have GPUs, nor does it exist during the darkest hour," and is building the best full-featured GPUs in China. "GPU," Moore's Threads will carry on this cause to the end. Meanwhile, he clarified four key areas of focus: accelerating independent research and development and innovation, refining high-quality products, promoting application implementation, and building a highly efficient team. This statement and action acted like a shot in the arm, greatly stabilizing market confidence and quickly translating into tangible capital support: within ten days of the internal letter's release, Moore Threads announced the completion of a B+ round of financing worth hundreds of millions of yuan, with investors including Zhongguancun Science City, Houxue Capital, Zhonghe Capital, Tuofeng Investment, Ceyuan Capital, and Hengji Puye, among others. Faced with this round of financing under extreme industry pressure, many investors expressed that it was "invaluable." This round of financing not only injected solid confidence into the market but also gave a temporary sigh of relief to all shareholders who were following Moore Threads. Meanwhile, facing this tough battle, Moore Threads also demonstrated its resilience with its continuously growing performance. In 2024, the company's revenue further increased to RMB 438 million, a year-on-year increase of 252% compared to 2023, and the revenue curve has maintained an upward trend. In the first half of 2025: operating revenue was approximately 702 million yuan, exceeding the total revenue of the past three years. The "hot" pre-IPO period and the difficulty in securing existing shares: Many early investors personally experienced Moore's Thread valuations rise from "high" to "low". The complete cycle of the pullback and the surge, and the last time they truly felt the capital market's enthusiasm for this company, was during the period of... In the second half of 2024, Moore Threads signed a listing guidance agreement with CITIC Securities, officially launching the IPO process. Following the news, the share price of Heertai, a listed company holding shares in Moore Threads, nearly doubled within just a few trading days—the profit-making effect was presented to the public so directly for the first time. The external environment has also undergone a fundamental change. With the continued strengthening of national policies on technological innovation and the full-scale explosion of the AI ​​industry, chip companies such as Cambricon have seen continuous surges in the secondary market. The entire market began to examine Moore's Thread with a new eye—its value as the "Chinese version of Nvidia" was being rediscovered and repriced. The frenzy in the primary market was vividly demonstrated in the pre-IPO rounds of financing at the end of the year. According to CVSource, as many as 38 investment institutions entered the company in this round, investing a total of RMB 5.225 billion, bringing the pre-investment valuation to RMB 24.62 billion. Even more shocking than these figures is the sheer intensity of the competition among various capital groups vying for market share, employing every possible means. In the versions we've heard, some peers have begged to transfer their existing shares, some limited partners (LPs) have offered to "invest in the next fund" in exchange for entry, and some have even resorted to family connections to make connections; it's truly a case of "tickets being extremely hard to come by." As time came to the beginning of 2025, Moore Threads announced another round of strategic financing, with investors including Gaoliang Capital, Mingde Boya, and Shanda Investment. Zhang Yuan, the investor mentioned above, revealed that his institution also wanted to increase its investment at this time, but even as an early shareholder, they still couldn't get any shares. Left with no other option, they had to turn to another competing company, which recently announced its IPO plans. There are also many other stories circulating in the market expressing regret over this missed opportunity. Investor B showed me a chat log: Last November, when the news of Moore's Threads' IPO first broke, a friend reminded him that there were shares available that he could "get on board." The valuation was around 24 billion yuan, but he declined, citing "too much uncertainty surrounding the IPO." The rest is history. Moore's Threads was approved in a flash, with a market capitalization of approximately 537 billion yuan, setting a record for the largest IPO on the Science and Technology Innovation Board this year. The record shows that those investors who hesitated, missed opportunities, or gave up can now only stare at this number and silently calculate the returns that could have been theirs. From its meteoric rise in 2020, reaching its peak immediately, to the industry's sudden "black swan" event leading to adjustments, and now its successful listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, Moore Thread's five-year entrepreneurial journey can be described as a hardcore breakthrough with twists and turns. On November 21st, at the IPO roadshow, the company's founder, Zhang Jianzhong, reiterated his original aspirations: "Although the company still lags behind Nvidia and AMD in terms of technological accumulation and product performance..." "We still lag significantly behind international giants, especially in the construction of ultra-large-scale GPU clusters and the maturity of their ecosystems. However, some performance indicators of our products have approached or reached international advanced levels, achieving breakthroughs in core products in some 'bottleneck' areas." He cited the MTTS80 graphics card as an example, noting that its single-precision floating-point computing power is close to that of Nvidia. The efficiency of a 1,000-calorie intelligent computing cluster built on the RTX3060 and MTTS5000 even surpasses that of comparable foreign products of the same generation. Zhang Jianzhong also mentioned that, driven by both external restrictive policies and the national demand for data security protection, the Chinese GPU market is accelerating its localization process, and domestic GPU companies are continuously breaking through intellectual property and technological barriers. Based on Frost & Sullivan's predictions, the localization rate of GPUs in the Chinese market will significantly increase in the future, gradually replacing imported products. The current surge in demand for AI computing power has undoubtedly opened an unprecedented window of opportunity for the development of domestically produced GPUs.