Legend Star harvests the 10th IPO

Professor Li Zexiang once again stands on the IPO stage.

On December 19, Xidi Zhijia officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the "first stock in commercial vehicle autonomous driving," with stock code 3881. The IPO price was HK$263 per share, with a market capitalization of HK$11.5 billion. With this, Legend Star has harvested another angel-round IPO.

The outside world may not know that Legend Star has collaborated with Professor Li Zexiang multiple times before. In 2017, Professor Li returned to his hometown in Hunan and led a team to establish Xidi Zhijia in Changsha, immediately thinking of Legend Star's investment team. In 2018, Legend Star, together with Sequoia China, Baidu, and others, invested in Xidi Zhijia's angel round, later adding more in the B round, creating another brilliant case in early-stage tech investment.

It is still remembered that at the end of last year, Pony.ai successfully listed on the U.S. stock market, causing a sensation. Behind the IPOs of these two star autonomous driving projects, Legend Star was an early supporter. Expanding the scope, Legend Star has now harvested 10 IPOs, spanning various sub-sectors in technology and healthcare. "From the first day of our establishment, we have insisted on industrializing technological achievements," recalled Wang Mingyao, President and Managing Partner of Legend Star. In the early-stage tech investment landscape of China, such a presence is impressive.

Another IPO for Professor Li Zexiang
The Angel Investment Story

Looking back at the growth journey of Xidi Zhijia, Professor Li Zexiang is undoubtedly the key figure.

This professor from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology pioneered the "mentor + student" angel investment model, funding students to apply their knowledge, nurturing and incubating over a hundred hard-tech companies. Among them, the Dongguan Songshan Lake International Robotics Industry Base, initiated by Li Zexiang and a group of scholars, later gave rise to star robotics companies like Hai Robotics, Kuma Technology, and Narwal, once sparking a VC frenzy to travel to Dongguan for projects.

"We were among the first batch to dig for projects at Songshan Lake," recalled Wang Mingyao. Since its inception, Legend Star has been committed to discovering and nurturing tech entrepreneurs, incubating tech startups, and driving the industrialization of technological achievements, which coincides with Professor Li Zexiang's philosophy. At the end of 2016, Legend Star participated in Hai Robotics' angel-round financing, marking the beginning of their collaboration.

Around the same time, the Changsha municipal government invited Li Zexiang, hoping he would build an incubation platform in Changsha similar to the Dongguan Songshan Lake Robotics Industry Base. Later, Li Zexiang established the Robotics Institute in Changsha and spearheaded the Changsha Intelligent Driving Research Institute, also conceiving the idea of creating an intelligent driving platform.

At that time, autonomous driving, as a major frontier technology integrating AI and automobiles, was already a confirmed investment direction within Legend Star. One day in October 2017, Professor Li Zexiang sent a message to Legend Star partner Gao Tianyao: "I heard you are interested in autonomous driving. We can discuss the Changsha intelligent driving project."

Gao Tianyao still remembers it vividly: "Professor Li led the team in research, believing that robotics and AI elements could be fully integrated into this scenario, thus deciding to venture into autonomous driving." From the start, Li Zexiang had three major directions in mind: "1. Commercial vehicles; 2. Limited scenarios; 3. New energy." After multiple exchanges, both sides agreed this was a viable entrepreneurial opportunity.

Soon, Li Zexiang brought in Dr. Ma Wei, a Silicon Valley expert with a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey and over 30 years of professional experience in robotics, signal processing, and the automotive industry. The two decided to start a business together, and Xidi Zhijia was born—a commercial vehicle autonomous driving technology provider focusing on R&D for autonomous mining trucks and logistics vehicles, V2X technology, and high-performance perception solutions, headquartered in the Yuelu Science and Technology Industrial Park in Changsha, Hunan. Currently, Li Zexiang serves as founder and chairman, while Ma Wei is co-founder, vice chairman, and chief architect. During this time, Li Zexiang also invited Dr. Hu Sibo, a graduate of UC Berkeley, to join Xidi Zhijia, where he now serves as executive director and CEO.

With a clear direction and a top-tier team, Xidi Zhijia quickly attracted the attention of many investors. The company's angel-round financing was soon finalized—Wang Mingyao recalled that at the time, there were quite a few investors approaching the Xidi Zhijia team, and the competition was fierce. "We locked in the first round of angel funding immediately." In February 2018, Legend Star invested $4 million in Xidi Zhijia.

After that, Xidi Zhijia grew rapidly, with its team expanding to over 200 people in just over a year. In 2019, Xidi Zhijia internally proposed that without infrastructure support, relying solely on single-vehicle intelligence would make it difficult to achieve systematic autonomous driving scenarios.

Therefore, as an early player in vehicle-road coordination, Xidi Zhijia's products gradually covered "smart vehicles" and "intelligent roads"—using autonomous heavy truck technology to develop unmanned pure-electric mining trucks and unmanned logistics vehicles for industrial parks, realizing unmanned transport scenarios; and providing a full range of vehicle-road-cloud coordination products for vehicle networking pilot zones, smart cities, and highways, offering various intelligent networking solutions.

"At the time, we saw the scalability of this part of the business and internally believed that mining operations and the exploration of 'smart vehicles' and 'intelligent roads' would present significant opportunities in the future," explained Gao Tianyao. In August 2021, Legend Star invested another RMB 30 million in Xidi Zhijia.

Today, Xidi Zhijia's technologies and products in autonomous driving, vehicle-road coordination, and high-performance perception are all industry leaders. According to the prospectus, as of June 30, 2025, Xidi Zhijia has delivered 304 autonomous mining trucks and 110 independent autonomous truck systems to customers. By 2024 revenue, Xidi Zhijia ranked third in China's (including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) autonomous mining truck solutions market.

Eight years in the making, Xidi Zhijia successfully rang the IPO bell, with entrepreneurs and their investors writing another model of mutual support in the venture capital circle.

One Investment Committee Meeting, Two Star Projects
The Autonomous Driving Investment Landscape

Looking back at Legend Star's journey in autonomous driving, Wang Mingyao and Gao Tianyao both mentioned an unforgettable investment committee meeting.

"At an investment committee meeting in November 2017, we simultaneously decided to invest in Pony.ai and Xidi Zhijia, with a total investment of $9 million," Wang Mingyao revealed. At the time, the internal investment amount for a single project was typically $1-2 million, making this meeting a memorable moment in Legend Star's history.

Among them, Pony.ai was co-founded by two tech giants, Peng Jun and Lou Tiancheng. Gao Tianyao still remembers that Pony.ai's Beijing office was located on the same Zhongguancun Entrepreneurship Street as Legend Star. The investment team went straight to their company, and Legend Star became the first investment institution Pony.ai contacted after launching its second round of financing.

"At that time, the company's Series A financing was intense, with large funding amounts and many investors." With time tight, Legend Star placed both Pony.ai and Xidi Zhijia on the investment committee agenda, unexpectedly creating a legendary moment in internal investment history. "From a results perspective, these two projects developed faster than we expected and brought very good returns," said Gao Tianyao.

But that's all in hindsight. Returning to the beginning of the story, this is a highly research-worthy topic: How did an early-stage investment team dare to make consecutive heavy bets in an industry still in a non-consensus stage?

"This stems from our judgment and understanding of the entire autonomous driving field at the time," Wang Mingyao admitted. Initially, external opinions on autonomous driving were not unified, but Legend Star believed that in the next 10 to 20 years, autonomous driving would be an inevitable trend.

Specifically, based on long-term deployment in the AI field, Legend Star judged that autonomous driving was a crucial direction for AI application scenarios. "So-called autonomous driving is essentially a massive application scenario for AI technology, especially early-stage recognition and decision-making technology."

Therefore, starting in 2014, Legend Star listed autonomous driving as an important track, investing in companies across various sub-sectors, including ADAS, millimeter-wave radar, AEB (automatic emergency braking), and lidar.

"Precisely because the threshold and technical value of autonomous driving are so high, we must invest in the most cutting-edge technology R&D teams." Wang Mingyao explained that in Legend Star's investment family, beyond Xidi Zhijia and Pony.ai, the founder of Axera, Qiu Xiaoxin, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and has assembled a team of international-level chip technology experts and top AI algorithm specialists. Konghui Technology is led by Guo Konghui, the first academician of the Chinese automotive industry... In simple terms, it's about selecting the "newest" and "most refined" projects in the industry.

Entrepreneurship is not easy, especially in high-tech fields like autonomous driving, where corporate survival is even more challenging. Beyond investment, Legend Star's other role is to act as a "super angel" beside entrepreneurs through initiatives like the Entrepreneur CEO Training Program, helping and accompanying companies in their growth.

The investment community learned that Legend Star's post-investment efforts mainly focus on three areas: first, helping core project teams grow through the Entrepreneur CEO Training Program; second, assisting projects in determining personalized development strategies through board participation; additionally, the "Entrepreneur Alliance" continuously provides services and shared resources to entrepreneurs, helping companies grow rapidly. Key executives like Liu Zhou, Vice President of Xidi Zhijia and head of the Smart Mining Division, have participated in the Entrepreneur CEO Training Program.

Over the past decade, as autonomous driving penetration has continued to rise and gradually achieved commercialization, Legend Star has witnessed the domestic autonomous driving industry grow from scratch to consensus.

"As time has passed, many industry chain-related tracks have started heating up in recent years." In February 2021, Legend Star led the Pre-A round of financing for Konghui Technology, a front-loading air suspension system supplier for passenger vehicles. At the time, air suspension was only standard in high-end models, and market views on its feasibility were not yet unified. But Legend Star was confident that with the rapid rise in new energy vehicle penetration and deepening intelligence, key component suppliers would see explosive opportunities, so they chose to invest.

A few years later, Legend Star's judgment was validated—air suspension began frequently appearing in the "arms race" of new car launches, and domestic air suspension suppliers like Konghui Technology gradually became market leaders. It is reported that Konghui Technology has secured air suspension system or air spring assembly qualifications for over 40 models from 16 automakers, including Voyah, Li Auto, Zeekr, Changan, Avatr, Aion, XPeng, and Chery.

There are many such cases. Based on years of deep cultivation, the investment team has been able to capture more cutting-edge industry opportunities, having invested in nearly 20 autonomous driving and related companies to date, with total investments reaching billions of yuan. With the successive IPOs of Pony.ai and Xidi Zhijia, Legend Star, after years of cultivation, has entered the harvest season for autonomous driving.

China's Tech Golden Age

A frontier technology investment map is gradually unfolding.

Through discussions, Legend Star internally summarizes its approach to frontier technology as industry deep cultivation—using AI as an entry point, continuously expanding the breadth and depth of investment in frontier technology, forming high-quality investment portfolios in various fields as sub-sector strongholds, and increasing resource dividends and cognitive accumulation to create a virtuous cycle.

AI is the main thread. Starting in 2010, Legend Star began deploying AI, investing in companies like Megvii and AISpeech for foundational AI technology. Later, it expanded into smart hardware, commercial aerospace, robotics, autonomous driving, chips, as well as blockchain and quantum technology. Following the same vein in AI, Legend Star has continuously expanded its unique "strongholds." Notably, 80% of the value from its current major exits in the tech field is related to AI.

Now, as the AI era roars in, new opportunities continue to emerge. "We will focus on the comprehensive integration of AI with various fields," revealed Gao Tianyao. Embodied intelligence is a very important investment direction for the team next. At the same time, there are new opportunities for new technologies to empower healthcare—since its inception, healthcare has been one of Legend Star's three major investment directions. After years of cultivation, AI healthcare, especially the combination of robotics and healthcare, has become a hallmark of Legend Star. The team has already invested in star projects like Jingfeng Medical, QL Intelligence, and Changmu Valley in this field.

However, Wang Mingyao also admitted that the development of embodied intelligence is just beginning and far from reaching the "iPhone 4" stage. "What does the best robot solution look like? It hasn’t taken shape yet. At this point, there are many innovative investment opportunities to explore."

This year, DeepSeek went viral globally, and Wang Mingyao observed a reassessment of Chinese assets. He believes this reassessment is good for exits: "The next few years may be a good time for us to push for exits." As he predicted, in the past few months, Hong Kong and A-shares have surged in turn, giving birth to a batch of companies with market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions, bringing a feast of returns to early investors.

The exit task now lies before all investment institutions. Wang Mingyao revealed that nearly 90 projects have already brought positive returns to Legend Star, "50% of which come from IPOs, and the other 50% from equity transfers, project mergers, etc."

It is worth mentioning that with Xidi Zhijia's bell ringing, Legend Star has harvested its 10th IPO since its establishment, with early tech investment results gradually seeing returns. Especially in the past two years, Legend Star has clearly entered a harvest period, with more IPO projects—Guoke Tiancheng, Pony.ai, PegBio, Xidi Zhijia, and other tech and healthcare projects have gone public in clusters. In China's early-stage venture capital field, it is rare for institutions to successfully promote 10 or more IPOs from their portfolio companies.

Behind this, it not only requires crossing complete economic and market cycles but also relies on deep insights into industry trends, systematic investment research capabilities, long-term stable capital support, and continuous deep cultivation in key sectors. However, Wang Mingyao also admitted that in the past, due to capital market system limitations, even with accurate vision, early-stage investments had to wait patiently for seven or eight years, objectively lengthening the overall pace. With policy-side efforts to smooth exit channels and the arrival of China's tech bull market, the current harvest scene has emerged. He revealed that as the fund enters the return period, the IPO process of portfolio companies is accelerating, and it is expected that 15 to 20 companies will soon go public. In addition, Legend Star's new fund is about to complete its first close.

Having experienced industry ups and downs, early-stage investors can often detect changes faster. Wang Mingyao sees that the current primary market is completely different from three to five years ago. "From the perspective of project growth ecology, after early-stage investment, subsequent financing is mainly participated in by local state-owned capital—this is the new ecosystem." Within it, everyone is adjusting their posture in unison.

Accompanying companies through the most difficult initial path and promoting the industrialization of technological achievements—this is the role China's venture capital industry is playing. As Chinese tech companies begin to step onto the world stage, their investor partners are also gradually emerging.

Legend Star

Legend Star was founded in 2008 and currently manages 11 early-stage investment funds with a total of RMB 5 billion, having invested in 400 projects.

As the early investment and incubation arm of Legend Holdings, Legend Star is rooted in nearly 40 years of entrepreneurial experience and resource accumulation, providing entrepreneurs with early-stage investment + deep incubation services, acting as a super angel beside entrepreneurs.

Early Investment: Mainly invests in three major fields—frontier technology, healthcare, and TMT—actively deploying in areas such as intelligent machines, internet transformation of traditional industries, biotechnology, and medical devices.

Deep Incubation: Manages and operates the "Entrepreneur CEO Training Program," providing professional and practical public welfare entrepreneurial training for entrepreneurs. In addition, the "Entrepreneur Alliance" continuously provides services and shared resources to entrepreneurs, helping companies grow rapidly and jointly creating the Legend Star entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Source: Legend Holdings Micro Space