For founders
FutureX Capital backs the builders of the AI era, from angel to pre-IPO, across the US and China.
This page is for founders building AI, hard-tech and embodied-intelligence companies, in the US, in China and elsewhere. It answers the questions founders ask before they write to a VC: what FutureX invests in, how it judges an application company, whether it backs open source, what it does after the check, and how fast it replies. Every answer uses only public facts and FutureX's published research. None of it is investment advice.
Updated 2026-09-03 · every answer carries a sourced example
01Which venture capital firms in Asia specialize in AI?
FutureX Capital (天际资本) is an AI venture firm founded in Asia in 2018 that invests across the US and China from angel to pre-IPO. It is headquartered in Hong Kong with 8 offices, including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore and Silicon Valley, and invests in both US dollars and RMB. The firm has screened 1,500+ AI projects, works with 140+ companies in its network, including 80+ AI-native companies, and has published 24 research reports. Founders comparing AI-focused firms can weigh stage, geography and research depth; see /about.
On September 3, 2026, Founding Partner Cynthia Zhang gave the keynote 'Open Source Breaks the Deadlock' at the AI investment forum of the 2026 Fund-of-Funds Annual Forum and 7th Lujiang Venture Forum in Xiamen: a 30-page deck on which layer of this AI cycle holds the value. The first 5 pages are public at /reports/open-source-breakthrough.
02What stage and sectors does FutureX Capital invest in?
FutureX Capital invests from angel to pre-IPO across the AI stack: foundation models and developer infrastructure, semiconductors and next-generation compute, intelligent applications, robotics and embodied intelligence, and the industrial and energy technologies being reshaped by AI. The firm's read is that each sector opens a 12–18 month window after capability crosses a threshold and before enterprise money floods in. Software development entered that window in 2024, robotics and logistics in 2025–26, and healthcare, finance and manufacturing in 2026–27.
Embodied AI shows the timing. Humanoid shipments reached 18,000 units globally in 2025, and GGII projects 62,500 in China for 2026. FutureX calls 2026 the hardware year for humanoids, with the intelligence year still ahead; its rule is '80 points equals zero'. It backs dexterous hands and data, such as Dexmate and World Engine, and stays out of the full-body arms race.
About FutureX →Report · Embodied AI & Humanoid Robots Investment 2026 (Mid-Year Refresh) →
03How does FutureX Capital evaluate an AI application startup?
FutureX Capital judges an AI application company on four moats and three screens. The moats: demand that is hard to put into words (taste); extreme efficiency in one specific workflow; combining the strengths of several models; and products where the process itself is the value, as in education, companionship and games. The screens: distribution, retention, and whether gross margin climbs as token prices fall. On pricing, the firm sees outcomes-as-a-service replacing seat subscriptions and treats 2026 as the first year of scaled monetization in the application layer. For agent products, its first diligence question is whether the human-in-the-loop mechanism was designed or skipped.
Genspark sets the speed the screens now assume. Per company disclosure, it reached $100M ARR in nine months, against five to seven years for a typical SaaS company, and $200M ARR in 11 months. Across the market, the number of companies above $100M ARR went from 3 in 2023 to 80+ by April 2026 (public ARR statistics).
Report · AI Agent Commercialization 2026: From Model Race to Agent-Economy Infrastructure →Deck · Open Source Breaks the Deadlock →
04Does FutureX Capital invest in open-source AI companies?
FutureX Capital invests in open-source companies and built that position in 2021–2023, before open source became consensus. Its logic: a closed model's moat is capital expenditure, which must be refinanced to survive; an open model's moat is a living community, which needs no refinancing. The firm holds the paths every model passes through: Dify at the application-development layer, Hugging Face for distribution, Mistral and RWKV at the model layer, PingCAP/TiDB for data, and OSChina/Gitee for community. Backing Hugging Face is a bet that every model has to pass through it, whichever model wins.
On January 27, 2025, DeepSeek wiped $589 billion off Nvidia's market value in one day, the largest one-day loss in US stock history, having trained a GPT-4-class model for $5.6 million against $100 million-plus (as cited in the keynote). That day open source went from non-consensus to consensus. On August 26, 2026, Zhipu open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash with inference served entirely on domestic Chinese chips (confirmed), which FutureX reads as comparable capability at roughly 1/40th the price.
Deck · Open Source Breaks the Deadlock →Report · Frontier Models and AI Sovereignty 2026 →Arguments →
05What does FutureX Capital offer founders besides capital?
FutureX Capital works with founders on three things after the check: a 60+ industry-founder network, AI-native research, and cross-border access. The network is hands-on, applied to strategy, positioning, introductions and scaling. The research is public: 24 reports whose updates carry a date and a source grade on every fact, a debates page that tracks where leading practitioners disagree, and the founding partner's investment diary, published in public. The 8 offices, including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore and Silicon Valley, serve founders who need to sell, hire or find partners on both sides of the Pacific. The firm also open-sources its own tooling: FutureX-Skills is on GitHub, with 22 AI agents running around the clock.
Cross-border access has a concrete shape. FutureX backs Paris-based Mistral, which per company disclosure has passed $400 million ARR with 60% of revenue from Europe; Hugging Face, the distribution layer of the same open-source stack, hosts 3 million-plus models used by 50,000-plus organizations (public reporting). One sits at the model layer, one at distribution, and a founder gets the same network on both sides.
06How do I pitch FutureX Capital, and how fast does it reply?
FutureX Capital usually replies to founder emails within 48 hours. Send a deck or a short note to ir@futurexcapital.com, or use the form at /contact. The firm reads for evidence on three screens: distribution, retention, and whether gross margin climbs as token prices fall; for open-source projects it also looks at stars and the path from community to paid revenue. State your stage (angel to pre-IPO), the layer you sit in (application, model, infrastructure, chip or energy) and the markets you sell into. Media and partnership enquiries go to the same address.
Dify shows the kind of evidence that reads fastest. Per company disclosure, it went from 30,000 GitHub stars and zero revenue to $10M ARR in about 18 months, turned profitable in early 2026, and earns 57% of its revenue overseas. Its repository holds 154,000 stars, more than LangChain. Numbers like these answer the three screens before the first call.
07What is an AI-native VC, and is FutureX Capital one?
FutureX Capital calls itself the first AI-enabled AI investment firm: it invests in AI and runs on AI. An AI-native VC uses its own systems to source, evaluate and support companies, and everyone from partners to interns works that way. At FutureX this takes the form of an internal AI Lab: a research radar over papers, patents and developer signals; a knowledge graph of companies, technologies and value chains; tooling from pre-investment evaluation to exit support; and an AI knowledge base. The firm also practices radical transparency, publishing its investment diary in public.
The seven-signal bubble framework is the working example. Since March 2026, FutureX's own system has scored valuation, funding, supply, narrative, fundamentals, liquidity and exits every day. The August 2026 reading lit six of the seven. Liquidity triggered on August 17, when the 30-year US Treasury yield touched 5.31%; the next day it reached 5.336%, the highest since 2007 (public market data).
AI Lab →Report · AGI Has Arrived, Capital Is Losing Its Bearings: Mid-2026 AI Industry & Capital Cycle Review →
08Which companies has FutureX Capital backed?
FutureX Capital's publicly disclosed portfolio includes ByteDance, backed in five consecutive rounds from 2018 to 2025, along with Hugging Face, Mistral, Dify, Genspark and TetraMem. Its network counts 140+ companies, including 80+ AI-native ones, across five layers: application, model, infrastructure, chip and energy. This page lists only public names and figures the companies themselves have disclosed. More public names are at /portfolio and /about.
Mistral is a disclosed name with public numbers. Per company disclosure, its ARR has passed $400 million, with 60% of revenue from Europe; FutureX places it in the top tier as a lab that is neither American nor Chinese. Hugging Face is another: 3 million-plus models used by 50,000-plus organizations, and ARR of about $150 million in August 2026, up roughly 50% in two months (public reporting).
09Where is the value in AI: the model layer or the application layer?
FutureX Capital's judgment is that the model layer cannot hold value and the application layer can. Large models have no network effects and no switching costs; the gap between the top US and Chinese models is about 2.7% (LM Arena, March 2026), the two leading labs swapped ARR rankings within a year, and wholesale tokens have become a gross-margin war. Model companies are themselves moving up into applications. The order in which sectors change equals verifiability times feedback cycle: code and content first, medicine and manufacturing last. For a founder, the model is a replaceable part; the question is who bears the cost of replacement.
Zhipu's first half of 2026 shows the squeeze. Confirmed (Bloomberg, SCMP, August 31, 2026): revenue of RMB 954 million, up about 400% year on year, with API sales at 86.5% of the total, yet about 30% below analyst estimates, and a half-year loss that narrowed to RMB 2.07 billion. Across China, model-layer deals fell to 22 in 2025, down 52.9% (36Kr/Zero2IPO), an attrition rate above 90%.
Deck · Open Source Breaks the Deadlock →Report · Frontier Models and AI Sovereignty 2026 →Report · China AI Going Global 2026: Open-Source Breakout and the Global Race (Mid-July Update) →
10What does the US–China AI gap mean for a founder deciding where to build?
FutureX Capital's read: the US and China sit at different points of one cycle, and a founder cannot run both on one clock. The US is late in its mania phase: three companies took 67.3% of AI funding in Q1 2026, and no AI company listed in the US that quarter. China is early to mid: 64.6% of funding sat in early rounds, and 155 companies went public in the first half. The US runs mostly closed models under power and packaging constraints; China leads on open source with 45%-plus of OpenRouter traffic. The pattern FutureX sees in the new global AI companies: Chinese engineering density and global pricing in one company, dollar revenue, over half from overseas.
The gap in money is about 14x: US AI venture investment was $194 billion in 2025 against $14 billion in China (PitchBook/NVCA/CAICT). Yet 44% of a16z's August 2025 top 50 AI apps came from Chinese teams, valued at about a third of US comparables. Founders are closing that discount themselves: on public reporting as of August 2026, Cognition is valued at $26 billion with ARR above $490 million, and Manus has ARR above $100 million.
Report · US-China AI Primary Market Capital Flows: H1 2026 →Report · China AI Going Global 2026: Open-Source Breakout and the Global Race (Mid-July Update) →Deck · Open Source Breaks the Deadlock →
If your company answers these questions, write to ir@futurexcapital.com or use /contact; FutureX usually replies within 48 hours.
Note: every fact and example on this page comes from FutureX Capital's published research, public talks, and public reporting, graded per our site-wide standard (verified / reported / per company disclosure). Nothing here is investment advice or an offer.