How will the Shanghai Future Industry Fund, with a scale of 10 billion yuan, invest after completing the registration?
“Enabling disruptive innovation transformation in Shanghai and China is our mission.” On the morning of January 8th, at the launch event for the investment strategy of the Shanghai Future Industry Fund, Wei Fanjie, the general manager of the fund, stated. The reporters from The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) learned from the event that the Shanghai Future Industry Fund had completed its association registration on January 7th.
At the event, the Shanghai Future Industry Fund released its investment strategy (provided by the organizer).
In September 2024, Shanghai announced the establishment of a future industry fund with a total scale of 10 billion yuan. The fund is fully funded by the Shanghai municipal government and has a term of 15 years, with an option to extend for another 3 years. In terms of risk tolerance, the fund adheres to market-based operations, accepts failure, and pursues exemption from liability with due diligence. In terms of investment mode, it adopts a combination of “sub-fund investment and direct investment”.
Wei Fanjie introduced that the future industry fund has three positioning objectives: firstly, to create patient capital and promote China’s exploration of “from 0 to 1” technological achievements transformation; secondly, to build a global talent community, connecting scientists, entrepreneurs, start-up founders, project managers and investors with top-notch intelligence and capabilities on the same platform; and thirdly, to establish an open innovation platform, based on mother funds, to promote interdisciplinary, cross-field and cross-platform collaboration.
Based on these positioning objectives, the investment strategy of the future industry fund will be carried out from three perspectives. The first is disruptive innovation, aimed at supporting multidisciplinary innovation, frontier platform technology directions and disruptive industrial potential technological innovation; the second is people-oriented, aimed at supporting scientists with innovative potential, entrepreneurs with a scientific spirit, investors with frontier scientific transformation capabilities, and young people with an exploratory spirit; the third is theme incubation, supporting scientists’ scientific and technological achievements transformation, systematic entrepreneurial incubation and full-cycle differentiated enabling.
Puhua Capital Management Partner Chen Datong told reporters that the industrialization of scientific research achievements “from 0 to 1” has always been a difficult problem. There has not been a true “from 0 to 1” incubation mechanism in the investment field before, and the Shanghai Future Industry Fund is an innovation.
Most enterprises focus on technologies that can be transformed within 5 years, but truly disruptive technological achievements often require 5 to 10 years or even 20 years to move towards industrialization. The future industry fund hopes to dig out these technologies and help China become a big innovator. To achieve this, the future industry fund will cooperate to incubate a large number of sub-funds and go deep into universities and research institutions.
From the perspective of an investor, Chen Datong believes that “from 0 to 1” should be the key strategic direction for the next era. Puhua Capital has prepared to summarize its past investment experience and establish sub-funds to cooperate with the future industry fund to promote disruptive innovation.
From the perspective of scientists and entrepreneurs, Zhang Linfeng, the founder and chief scientist of DeepTech, said that scientists face two challenges in entrepreneurship: uncertainty in technology research and development, and finding good organizational managers and partners.依托未来产业基金，他期待看到一个真正以颠覆性技术“从0到1”发展为主题的、科技感更强的社区。
可控核聚变、脑机接口、量子计算、硅光、空天计算、合成生物学…魏凡杰表示，未来健康、未来信息、未来能源、未来空间、未来材料等，都会是未来产业基金关注的方向，并希望和子基金投资人还有科学家们共同探索新的方向，探索未来是什么。 (Note: This part of the text seems to be a repetition or a continuation of the previous paragraph, so I have combined it together for translation.)
Controlled nuclear fusion, brain-computer interface, quantum computing, silicon photonics, aerospace computing, synthetic biology… Wei Fanjie said that future health, future information, future energy, future space, future materials, etc., will all be directions of interest for the future industry fund. He also expressed hope to explore new directions with sub-fund investors and scientists alike to discover what the future holds.
