Wenyao Ding

Wenyao Ding is a founding partner of Rising Capital (云起资本), the brand of Beijing Yunqi Investment Management Co., Ltd. The firm was established in June 2015 with registered capital of RMB 50 million, and Ding has served as a founding partner (and the firm's legal representative) since its inception in 2015. He is a graduate of the Beijing Institute of Technology (北京理工大学).

Rising Capital positions itself as a "culture-industry-focused investment fund" pursuing value investing and industrial upgrading across China's creative and content economy. Its flagship vehicle, the "New Generation Venture Fund" (新生代创投基金), backs early-stage projects at the intersection of new media, scenario-based consumption, and cross-disciplinary technology, and the firm describes its model as combining early incubation with hands-on "product management and capital operations" to grow portfolio value. Alongside Ding, the firm's leadership has included founding partners Chen Shuting (陈姝婷) and Bu He (布和), venture partner Zhang Yi (张翼), and investment director Huang Shaomin (黄少敏).

Ding is an active commentator on technology investing. In a widely circulated interview, he laid out Rising Capital's research-driven view on blockchain — covering fundamentals, regulatory policy, industry trends, and individual projects — and was notably skeptical of the crypto bubble, arguing that "a large number of projects will be proven false, and the prosperity of the coin circle will be hard to sustain." He identified finance, IoT, content copyright, and personal identity management as the use cases most likely to see near-term, real-world blockchain adoption.

Note on naming: the Chinese name 云起资本 (Rising Capital, Beijing, rcap.cc) is distinct from the similarly romanized 云启资本 / Yunqi Partners (a separate Shanghai-based tech VC); the two are frequently confused in databases but are different firms.

• Stage: Concentrates on the earliest rounds — angel, Pre-A, Series A and A+ — backing teams before product-market fit is proven.
• Core thesis: "Value investing and industrial upgrading in the cultural industry"; invests in "projects and teams with innovative consciousness and a hacker spirit."
• Sectors: New media and mobile internet, social and community economy, media/content e-commerce, creative design, animation and gaming, entertainment content, offline experiential consumption, entertainment O2O, and niche/long-tail subcultures.
• Adjacent and later interests: Per its 36Kr investor profile, the firm's activity has broadened over time into deep-tech areas including semiconductor materials and design and medical devices.
• On crypto/blockchain (in his own words): Skeptical of speculative froth — "a large number of projects will be proven false; the prosperity of the coin circle will be difficult to sustain" — while constructive on blockchain applications in finance, IoT, content copyright, and identity. The firm backed blockchain media platform ChainDD (链得得) and content-copyright public chain U Network.