A Milestone Moment.
On the evening of July 23, ChangXin Technology (688825.SH) announced that the company would be listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board on July 27. The IPO price this time is set at 8.66 yuan per share, with a planned fundraising amount of about 58 billion yuan — this means that the largest IPO in the history of the Sci-Tech Innovation Board is about to take place.
The outside world may not know that in this narrative of China's storage sector rise, a female investor has emerged — Dr. Polly Peng, a managing partner at Huadeng Gaoke. Five years ago, it was she who, under pressure, made the largest investment of nearly 900 million and contrarian heavily invested in ChangXin Technology.
Not long ago, the investment community met Dr. Peng on a business trip in Beijing. Rarely seen in the public eye, she recounted for the first time the past events related to ChangXin.
Five Years Ago, One Day, Four Cities
When talking about ChangXin, Dr. Peng first remembered a day in four cities five years ago.
It was at the end of August 2021, when Huadeng was holding an internal monthly meeting by the West Lake in Hangzhou. The team was unable to reach a consensus on the investment in ChangXin. The meeting that day went on late into the night, and the ChangXin project team had been discussing for a long time — the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) track was too difficult, too risky, and the cycle was too long. Most institutions had avoided it, and there were also internal disagreements at Huadeng.
The team's concerns were very specific: at that time, during the industry and capital downturn, with low investment market confidence during the pandemic, and the Sci-Tech Innovation Board frenzy fading.
There was silence in the meeting room for a long time. It wasn't until one partner spoke up, in a calm tone, as if stating an undeniable fact: "This project must be invested in. Although it is very challenging, I personally will invest 15 million yuan. This team is too outstanding."
There was no applause, only silence. Dr. Peng later explained — when the industry is so difficult that the financial model cannot quantify it, the judgment of the founder is the most significant model. "It is precisely because we have seen too many failures of storage projects,
that we know in this track, people are more important than numbers."
The meeting adjourned late into the night. The next morning, as dawn broke, she rushed to catch the earliest flight.
That day, Dr. Peng visited four cities. First, she flew to Beijing in the early morning, accompanying the ChangXin team for institutional roadshows.
On the plane, she had a thick stack of spreadsheets in front of her.
After the roadshow, she immediately rushed to Beijing Daxing International Airport to catch a flight to Hefei. Upon arriving in Hefei in the afternoon, she went straight to the frontline workshop of Changxin Factory. The workshop was brightly lit, with the air being kept at a constant temperature, carrying a slight chill. Changxin's founder, Zhu Yiming, was dressed in a cleanroom suit, pointing through the glass to the equipment in the clean room, explaining the technological progress as he walked. She followed behind, listening and pondering a practical question: how much money does this production line really need to get up and running?
In the evening, she had boxed meals in the factory meeting room, enjoying braised pork belly and a few side dishes. As everyone ate, they discussed topics such as how to lock in production capacity, the financing strategy to adopt, and the step-by-step process to pave the way.
Late at night, Dr. Peng caught the last high-speed train back to Shanghai, arriving home in the early morning. In the notes on her phone, she wrote a line: "Hangzhou → Beijing → Hefei → Shanghai. Worth it."
During the subsequent investment decision meeting, the Warburg team once again debated Changxin extensively. What the outside world was not aware of at the time was that the pressure they were under was much greater than imagined. As a venture capital firm, Warburg focused more on early-stage investments, with the size of a single investment usually being several tens of millions of RMB, while Changxin required an amount close to the size of a fund.
In response, Dr. Peng did not delve too much into financial models, but instead emphasized repeatedly: "Someone has to do this, everyone is waiting, so who is going to do it?" In the end, she went against the consensus and decided to invest nearly 900 million RMB in Changxin.
Thus, this facilitated the largest investment in Warburg China's history.
Such a scale also meant that the fundraising difficulty was not to be underestimated. To this end, Dr. Peng and her team painstakingly talked to each LP, aiming to convey a consensus—that investing in Changxin meant supporting the country, supporting the development of the domestic semiconductor industry. It was the long-term support and unwavering trust of the LPs behind them that gave Warburg the confidence to make a heavy bet.
Ten Years Ago, From Zilliz to Changxin Technology
In 2016, Changxin was established in Hefei. Warburg did not miss a single key meeting in this project—from the project initiation meeting to the due diligence meeting, as the lead investor in the project, Hefei Venture Capital, was a long-standing strategic partner of Warburg.
But this relationship can be traced back even further.
In 2005, Zhu Yiming returned to China to found Zilliz Innovation, with Warburg standing behind him. After the company went public in 2016, he did not stop but instead turned to more challenging endeavors, attempting to tap into the DRAM market, thus giving birth to the story of Changxin Technology.
As an investor who has been deeply involved in the semiconductor industry for many years, Dr. Peng understands the challenges involved: high barriers to entry, significant investment requirements, and long development cycles. The characteristics of the semiconductor industry are vividly demonstrated in the DRAM track.
“At that time, domestic DRAM was still not widely trusted. IBM's fab had collapsed, and even with the full support of Germany and Japan, they couldn't establish a strong foothold in the storage industry. Therefore, almost all mainstream institutions in the market at that time avoided it,” Dr. Peng recalled.
After the ZTE incident in 2018, she became more and more convinced of one thing: China's semiconductor industry needs its own supply chain. What was even more crucial was that this was led by Zhu Yiming. “A company in such a critical sector and at a critical point cannot be overlooked.”
Dr. Peng had known Zhu Yiming for a long time and knew he was not the kind of person to “try and retreat if it doesn’t work out.” She saw his dedication clearly: “In the past, after some companies went public, they either entered the real estate sector or crossed into finance. But Zhu Yiming continued to focus on the storage track, which made us take notice.”
What impressed the Huawen team the most was Zhu Yiming's true, grand dream. He never set limits for himself or his company, daring not only to think but also to act. In other words, he was an entrepreneur unafraid of the scale of things.
Chinese semiconductors are not lacking in funds; what they lack are people willing to spend a decade honing an industrial chain. In Dr. Peng's view, the essence of investment is precisely to connect with the entrepreneur's dream. The entrepreneur's focus and perseverance are where her determination lies.
Changxin Technology also lived up to expectations, completing in a few years what took overseas giants more than a decade, or even several decades, to accomplish. As they were about to witness the birth of this epic IPO, the Huawen team was filled with emotion. The contrarian heavy investment five years ago was vivid, and Dr. Peng's feelings were even deeper. Most of the companies invested in by Huawen are long-term projects, meaning that the investment team has to sit on this cold bench for 10 or even 15 years.
But she always emphasized to the team that hard work would never be in vain. “There are very few institutions that started in Silicon Valley and are still at the forefront of hard technology investment. Only Huawen has consistently persisted. Because we believe that holding on will eventually lead to seeing the light.”
Those Who Persevere Will Eventually Reap the Rewards of Time
This is a microcosm of Dr. Peng's investment career.
Looking back at 2015 when she first joined Huawen, the team gave her the initial impression of being “engineer investors” – lacking the elite style of Wall Street. However, their precise assessment of the changes in China's semiconductor industry impressed her.
After joining Huawen, her first investment was in brain-machine interface technology – a field that wasn't even considered a track at the time. She invested $3 million in Neuralink when the company had not yet emerged from the lab. What moved her was the original intention of Neuralink's founder,
Han Bicheng – “Technology for Good.”
She subsequently invested in Yitang Stock, Chiphello Semiconductor, Guanxin Semiconductor, and more... As Changxin is about to debut on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, this female partner at Huadeng, who made the largest single investment in Chinese history, has proven herself through one hardcore investment after another.
Having spent ten years with Huadeng, Dr. Peng witnessed firsthand how these super projects went from being "unbelievable" to "universally recognized." She gradually realized that Huadeng was not just making investments but rather standing by the side of the companies when they needed a partner the most. This was actually a mutual commitment, and it is this resonance with the companies that is at the core of Huadeng's ability to seize super projects without fail.
"I often emphasize within Huadeng - as long as the founder does not give up, we will not give up." She describes Huadeng as a "patient fund": refusing to follow the market frenzy, doubling down contrarily during industry downturns, not chasing short-term bubbles, but instead, staying focused and accompanying the company through cycles. This steadfastness is the most precious heritage Huadeng has passed down.
As the outside world can see, among the long list of shareholders behind Changxin, the presence of market-oriented VC/PE funds is rare, and Huadeng is one of the few that stayed with heavy positions. Looking back to when Changxin urgently needed help, the reason Dr. Peng and Huadeng did not hesitate was not because they were smarter than others, but because she knew that when the direction and the people were right, all that was left was to wait for time to validate it.
"Perhaps pessimistic people are correct, but optimistic people always reap rewards." Just like that night five years ago, she firmly chose to be optimistic.
After over thirty years in the Chinese venture capital industry, through ups and downs, the winding river of time flows forward. Some have joined the industry, while others have quietly exited. At the end of an exchange with the investment community, when asked, "After so many years of investment, what do you believe in the most?" Dr. Peng pondered for a moment and gave an answer: "Investment is about believing in time."
She remembered when a predecessor once said, "The essence of investment is simplicity in the grand way. Firmly choose to walk with those who share the same aspirations. Time is the best friend, bringing the finest gifts." She still holds these words dear.
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