China’s Winreal Investment has held the first closing of a new RMB-denominated fund at 1.3 billion yuan ($149.5 million) as the investment company targets a hard cap of no more than 2 billion yuan ($293 million) to invest in 5G development.
As the second of its 5G fund series, Winreal already completed the business registration for this vehicle and sealed commitment agreements with limited partners (LPs), including 5G industry corporates, investment institutions and China’s government-led funds for the first closing, the firm announced in a post on its WeChat official account on Monday. It expects to hold the final closing before the end of this year.
The new fund, whose Chinese name can be translated into “Rongteng 5G Industry Fund II”, followed the second closing of its predecessor fund, Rongteng 5G Industry Fund, at 1.2 billion yuan ($175.7 million) in December 2020. This maiden 5G fund was set up in June 2019 with an initial target of raising 2 billion yuan.
While most existing LPs of its Fund I continued to support the new vehicle, Winreal said in the post that Chinese state-owned carmaker SAIC Motor and UOB Venture Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore’s United Overseas Bank Limited, both subscribed to the vehicle.
Chinese domestic investors such as Haitian Group, Hangzhou Industrial Investment Group, kitchen and toilet product producer BRTR, high-speed optical transceiver maker InnoLight and chip design house Nebula Tech also made commitments, alongside Hou Weigui, founder and chairman of Chinese telecom group ZTE Corporation.
The firm added that institutional investors have by far accounted for over 70% of the LPs in the new fund.
Winreal started deploying capital from Fund I in March 2020, roughly two months after it achieved the first closing of the previous fund. Its 5G investments span a wide range of sectors, including telecommunication, new energy, digital solutions as well as the production of smartphones and intelligent connected vehicles.
In 2020, Winreal raised the stakes in companies developing automotive chips and related components to enable offerings such as auto power management and LiDAR scanners used in self-driving vehicles, as the firm observed “a convergence between cars and intelligent terminals”, it said.
Last year, the firm ventured into new segments such as robotics, extended reality (XR), and aerial transportation, where startups rose to leverage technological advancements in energy, hardware, materials and automation to reshape traditional manufacturing and people’s daily lives.
Established in 2015 by former ZTE executives Huang Jinping and Liu Hongchun, Winreal has built a portfolio of companies, including MiningLamp Technology, a big data and artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn backed by tech giant Tencent and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. It has also invested in quadruped robot developer Unitree Robotics; cloud computing startup BoCloud; and JustPower Technology, which offers engine systems for hydrogen industrial vehicles.
Winreal operates from offices across Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen and Jiaxing,