Chengyu Mao

Chengyu Mao is a co-founder and managing partner of Yunqi Partners (云启资本), a Shanghai-based venture capital firm he established in 2014 together with co-founder and managing partner Yubin Huang (黄榆镔). Mao has been active in China's venture capital industry for more than 20 years, with a long-standing focus on early- and mid-stage opportunities in mobile internet, fintech, artificial intelligence, and the industrial internet.

Before founding Yunqi, Mao spent roughly 1999–2014 at IDG Capital (IDGVC), one of China's most prominent early venture firms, where he rose to Partner and served as a member of the investment decision committee. His public LinkedIn lists him as a former Partner at IDGVC. Prior to his venture career, he worked at Unilever, where he was responsible for finance and commercial analysis for the Greater China business.

Mao holds a bachelor's degree in Industrial Foreign Trade from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an MBA from CEIBS (China Europe International Business School), and an EMBA from the PBC School of Finance (Wudaokou), Tsinghua University.

Yunqi Partners positions itself as one of the first China funds to concentrate on technology-empowered industries, systematically investing in the digital transformation of industries and the industrialization of technologies. Under Mao's leadership, the firm has backed 160+ startups since inception, with 30+ becoming industry leaders. He was recognized on PEdaily's "2023 Top 100 Investors" list and named to the Forbes China 2024 "Best 100 Venture Investors" list (ranked #31) in December 2024.

• Rooted in AI & Deep Tech, partnering with early founders — the firm's stated positioning is early-stage backing of frontier technology, drawing on "over a decade of experience in artificial intelligence."
• Focus areas span industrial internet, frontier/deep tech, and enterprise services, plus infrastructure SaaS, supply tech, and enterprise SaaS.
• On his macro thesis, Mao has said "information technology and energy technology are the two great engines driving the development of human civilization," and advocates finding long-term variables and underlying logic amid uncertainty.
• On AI: he frames large-model-era AI as "a university graduate with broad general education and multiple latent abilities" — a qualitative leap over machine-learning-era "specialized vocational students" — and highlights multimodality, reasoning, and generalization as the three pivotal capabilities.
• Sees differentiated opportunity in Chinese-language large models (noting Chinese NLP corpora make up only ~2% of data), embodied intelligence and agents, and combining new robotics with China's manufacturing base.