Fudan University has officially set up its technology innovation fund-of-funds (FoF) with 1 billion yuan (about $141 million) in the first close, as more universities in China explore ways to participate in startup incubation.
Fudan Tech Innovation FoF is tasked with “building an ecosystem for the commercialisation of on- and off-campus scientific findings,” said Fudan University in a post on its WeChat official account.
It will focus on industries “deemed important to the national and municipal development strategies” including life science, semiconductor, artificial intelligence (AI), biopharmaceutical, new energy, new material, and extended reality (ER)—a catch-all term referring to augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR).
The fund is open to working with global general partners (GPs) who “can understand and walk alongside scientists,” said Sun Pengjun, who leads the fund operations. A Fudan University alumnus, Sun is the executive dean of the Ningbo Research Institute at Fudan University, as well as the chairman and controller of Shanghai-based Furong Investment.
The fund will primarily invest in “early-stage, small-sized startups developing hard technologies” and “studies of high-risk, but high-value, scientific puzzles, especially the ones that, once solved, may advanced social progress and lead future development,” according to the post.
Fudan University said it aims to become the long-term patient capital behind high-potential tech projects.
Located in the financial hub of Shanghai, Fudan University launched the fund in partnership with the municipal government and Chinese state-owned companies such as Shanghai State-Owned Capital Investment and Shanghai Xuhui Capital Investment.
Fudan University’s move to launch the vehicle comes as Chinese universities, which have invested in the tech sector for a few decades through university foundations in a hands-off manner, started looking for more active participation in the venture world.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), which counts HongShan’s founding partner Neil Shan and Robin Zeng, founder of CATL, the world’s largest battery maker for electric vehicles (EVs), among its alumni, was the first university in China to build an FoF. The university announced in December 2021 the first close of the FoF at 1 billion yuan, as it looks to primarily back seed- and early-stage startups with an SJTU nexus.
University FoFs and education foundations in China may play a bigger role in providing patient capital to help address liquidity challenges in the current market downturn. But this group of domestic LPs is still new in the game compared to their US counterparts like Yale University endowment and Harvard University endowment.
Tsinghua University was the first in China to build a university foundation in 1994, followed by the launch of the Peking University Education Foundation one year later. Other universities like Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, and Tongji University followed suit in the years that followed.
