Early-stage financing logic in hot sectors is being restructured: angel rounds start at the hundred-million level, two rounds run in parallel, and pricing is based on the endgame

[[**The early-stage financing logic of hot tracks is being restructured: angel rounds start at the hundred-million level, two rounds proceed in parallel, due diligence is scaled back, and pricing is based on the endgame; but ordinary projects still struggle to raise funds, and signs of a pullback in valuation logic have already appeared.**

**Key points**

**1. Angel rounds start at the hundred-million level, and exceeding 100 million has become a publicity threshold**

Teams in hot tracks start their angel rounds at the hundred-million level, with top ones exceeding 1 billion; cases such as Moqi Intelligence at over 1 billion and Yuyong Technology at US$220 million have set new records.

**2. Top-tier financings run two rounds in parallel, and due diligence is compressed**

Star projects start the next round before the previous one has closed, with the pace compressed from more than half a year to weeks or days; institutions find it hard to conduct independent due diligence, and decisions shift from "whether to invest" to "whether we can squeeze into the allocation."

**3. Pricing shifts to endgame valuation**

AI, embodied intelligence and other sectors are directly benchmarked against the sector's endgame to work backward to angel-round value; top teams can be valued at 2 billion to 5 billion yuan even without a product, and traditional fundamental anchors no longer apply.

**4. Ordinary projects still struggle to raise funds, and the funding gap widens**

In Q3, early-stage financings averaged 62.4492 million yuan per deal, with a median of only 20 million yuan; capital is concentrating in early-stage leaders and pre-IPO deals, there is a gap in growth-stage B/C rounds, and ordinary projects easily face funding cutoffs.

**5. The high-valuation logic has begun to pull back**

There have already been flat-round cases with an angel-round valuation of 2 billion and an A round of only 1.8 billion; if flat rounds and down rounds in A rounds exceed 30%, upward momentum may be exhausted, and this is also affected by listing performance and state-owned capital's tolerance for error. 2026-10-30 15:00 "If your financing isn't over 100 million, you're embarrassed to say so" — a quick look from Touzhongwang

Over the past period, because of my work on first-time financings, I have come into intensive contact with many projects, and the most direct shock for me has been that the "ceiling" for early-stage projects is getting higher and higher.

Take angel rounds as an example. A few years ago, it was normal for companies raising angel rounds to raise hundreds of thousands to a few million yuan, and a hard-tech project that could get tens of millions was already considered a "big angel round." Today, teams with good backgrounds in hot tracks basically start angel rounds at the hundred-million level, and top teams can even get more than 1 billion, with the record for the "largest angel" constantly being broken.

In the past three months alone, three angel rounds of more than 1 billion were born:

In July, Moqi Intelligence, co-founded by former Huawei "genius youth" Huang Qingqiu, announced the completion of an angel-round series totaling more than 1 billion yuan, with a post-investment valuation exceeding 7 billion yuan;

In August, Yuyong Technology, founded by former Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen core head Lin Junyang, completed a US$220 million financing just three months after its founding, with no product and no revenue, at a post-investment valuation of about US$2 billion;

In October, AI agent company Huihe Intelligent Technology completed another angel round of more than US$200 million.

The overall rise in the "water level" of early-stage financing has also changed the industry's publicity threshold. A PR friend complained to me: "Now if a project's financing isn't over 100 million, you're embarrassed to publicize it."

Of course, the "level-jumping" of financing amounts and valuations is only the surface. The more common consensus in conversations is that the financing logic of early-stage projects has been restructured over the past two years, and many of these changes are even "unprecedented."

Due diligence on top projects has become a "luxury"

In May this year, my colleague Zhang Nan wrote an article mentioning that some star projects directly start two or even three rounds at the same time when financing. Recently, this phenomenon has become increasingly common.

J, a founding partner of a dual-currency fund, told me that several early-stage projects he recently contacted were required to split one sum of money into two rounds and invest at different valuations, otherwise they could not even get a share in one round. "In more than 20 years in the industry, I have never encountered such a situation," J sighed.

Another VC investor A also revealed that when competing for an early-stage allocation in an optical interconnect company, they were not only required to commit to the next round but also told they had to be the lead investor.

FAs may feel this even more strongly. Cao Jishan, founding partner of Yundao Capital, said that "advancing two rounds in parallel" is now standard practice for top projects. "Many star projects today simply don't wait for the previous round to fully close before directly starting the next round of financing. In one embodied intelligence project we encountered, the previous round's SPA had just been signed and the business registration change had not yet been submitted, when more than a dozen TSs for the next round had already been received. There have even been cases in the industry where 'the previous round's money hasn't arrived yet, but the next round of financing has already been officially announced.' This completely breaks the previous default rule of 'start the next round only after one round is settled.'"

The spread of "two rounds in parallel" among top projects has also driven an overall acceleration in the pace of financing itself. Especially in the first half of this year, in hot hard-tech tracks such as embodied intelligence, AI, commercial space, controlled nuclear fusion and quantum computing, the financing pace of top projects has been compressed directly from more than half a year in the past to monthly or weekly calculations, with some extreme cases even advancing by the day or week.

Cao Jishan revealed that among the projects he participated in, there have already been cases of "scheduling a second-round meeting on the same day as the initial contact, going directly into due diligence in the second round, and discussing the SPA terms process in the third round." "In the past, investors needed three months to complete the entire chain of project initiation, due diligence and investment decision; now it has to be completed in one to two weeks. Hesitate a little, and the project allocation may no longer be locked in."

With the financing pace compressed like this, the first thing sacrificed is the "due diligence" step.

The version I heard is that many star projects no longer open up deep due diligence, providing only a standardized third-party report and interview records of the core team. Some founders even state their terms outright—no valuation adjustment mechanism, no buyback, no deep due diligence; whoever's money arrives first gets the allocation. In even more extreme cases, institutions wanting to lock in an investment allocation must also prepay an investment deposit, and many co-investors have no room for independent due diligence at all, and can only directly reuse the lead investor's report.

To some extent, the decision-making question for institutions has now shifted from "whether to invest" to "whether we can squeeze into the allocation"—delay by a week, and not only is the quota gone, but the next round's valuation may even double outright.

Lingxin Qiaoshou is a typical example. In May last year, I wrote an article about dexterous hands ("The Robot's 'Last Centimeter' Is Going Viral"), when Lingxin Qiaoshou had just completed a seed round at a valuation of 400 million yuan, and the new round's valuation was being quoted at 800 million, with many investors already calling it "crazy." But everyone knows how the story went afterward: in just over a year, the target valuation of its new round of financing is said to have shot straight to $6 billion (about 40 billion yuan).

"Frankly speaking, in actual transactions right now, the sense of an accelerated pace is very strong, and many past industry common sense has completely failed," Cao Jishan said.

Pricing from Day One on an Endgame Basis

In fact, whether it is the inflation of financing amounts and valuations, the spread of "two rounds advancing in parallel," or the acceleration of the financing pace, they all point to the same thing: the pricing logic of early-stage investment has been restructured, and behind this is the combined effect of multiple factors.

Over the past few years, 70% of primary market capital has come from state-owned capital, which means the choices of the "national team" basically determine the flow and preferences of the vast majority of capital in the market. For this reason, a consensus has gradually formed in VC/PE circles: invest by following the government work report.

Now if you casually ask any early-stage investor what tracks they are watching, the answers are invariably embodied intelligence, low-altitude economy, commercial aerospace, brain-computer interfaces, controllable nuclear fusion... all of which without exception fall within the scope of emerging industries and future industries in the "15th Five-Year Plan."

As the certainty of the tracks strengthens, the investment logic of GPs naturally changes accordingly. The capital parties currently participating in early-stage investment mainly include three types: market-oriented VCs, state-owned institutions and industrial capital. Although different capital attributes determine different decision-making yardsticks, the collective FOMO of market-oriented VCs to "rather invest wrongly than miss out," industrial capital's pursuit of strategic positioning by strengthening and supplementing chains, and state-owned institutions' pursuit of a "security narrative" all make them converge on the leading projects in the tracks, even at the cost of paying a premium. At the same time, the industry's valuation and pricing standards for these projects have also shifted.

"Two years ago, when we priced angel-round hard-tech projects, it was a very clear, almost uncontroversial standardized system, with the core built around 'certainty already in hand.' Now, when pricing leading projects in leading tracks such as AI and embodied intelligence, traditional fundamental anchors have completely failed, and the core pricing logic has become directly benchmarking against the endgame valuation of the track's final landscape, and then working backward to the option value of the angel round," Cao Jishan said.

He took team screening as an example: what is looked at now is not the team's past small achievements, but whether the team can support the ceiling of "the next-generation platform-level company in the track." For example, if the core team consists of world-class scientists in large models or humanoid robots, or an engineering lead who has brought out hundred-billion-dollar-level products, then even if the company has just been registered and the product has not been made at all, the valuation can directly jump to 2 billion to 5 billion yuan, equivalent to the valuation of projects at the A-round stage in the past.

"This is essentially a paradigm shift in the primary market: in the past, the angel round was 'using small money to trial and error, with staged pricing by milestones'; now early-stage projects in hot tracks are priced on an endgame basis from day one, with sufficient funds given directly to let the project skip the validation period and lock in positioning before the giants enter," Cao Jishan said.

"Ordinary Projects and Leading Projects Are Completely Two Different Worlds"

It should be emphasized that the many phenomena described above, as well as the changes in investment institutions' decision-making logic, are all discussed around leading projects in hot tracks, rather than being a general trend across the entire industry.

This can actually be seen from the data. According to CVSource data from Touzhong Jiachuan, in the third quarter of 2026, there were 974 domestic early-stage investment events, with a disclosed total investment amount of about 60.825 billion yuan and an average single financing amount of 62.4492 million yuan. But what is noteworthy is that the median single financing amount in Q3 was only 20 million yuan.

In other words, the average of over 60 million is the result of averaging out large financings; the money obtained by more early-stage projects is still below 20 million yuan.

In addition, from the perspective of capital distribution, the entire market has now shown an extreme "big at both ends, small in the middle" pattern: the early seed round, angel round and Pre-A round are crowded with state-owned capital, market-oriented VCs and industrial capital, while the Pre-IPO stage is taken up by large industrial funds and national-level funds. Instead, the growth stage and B/C round range, where capital was most concentrated in the past, have seen an obvious funding gap because of the massive exit of traditional private VCs.

For ordinary projects already tight on funds, this undoubtedly worsens the difficulty of survival—it is very easy to encounter a financing cutoff during the growth stage.

However, according to Cao Jishan of Yundao Capital, as the bubble gradually releases, the extreme pricing logic of the "endgame option" for leading projects has recently begun to pull back somewhat, and the pricing anchor is migrating toward an intermediate state. "Cases have already begun to appear in the current market where the angel round valuation is 2 billion and A-round investors are only willing to give 1.8 billion in a flat round. Once flat rounds and down rounds account for more than 30% of A-round financing across the market, it will show that the upward momentum in early-stage project valuations has been completely exhausted, and the high-valuation logic will be broken."

At the same time, he mentioned that the future performance in the secondary market of leading companies in various tracks after listing, as well as adjustments by state-owned LPs to the "error tolerance space" for early-stage projects, will also affect the subsequent evolution of this logic.

At present, the market is seeking a new balance between heat and risk control. For investment institutions, the real test may no longer be simply whether they can squeeze into a certain round's allocation in a hot project, but whether, when the pricing anchor swings back, they still have a decision-making framework that can stand up to verification. Channel: Finance and Economics. This content is published with the author's authorization; the views represent only the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. If you have objections or complaints about this manuscript, please contact tougao@huxiu.com. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP [ ]