Author: Stone Jin, IPO Insider
On the evening of June 5, 2025, Beijing time, Circle Internet Group (hereinafter referred to as "Circle") officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the stock code "CRCL", becoming the "first global stablecoin stock".
Two trading days later, Circle's stock price has risen 247.42% from its issue price, with a market value of approximately $24 billion. In fact, during this IPO, Circle had previously raised the number of issued shares and issue price multiple times, ultimately raising $1.1 billion and receiving over 25 times oversubscription.
Behind thismost talked-about large IPO of 2025 so far, there are numerous investors with Chinese backgrounds. Among them, Lei Ming, who was an investor at HT New Economy Fund, invested in Circle in 2018. With Circle's listing, these early investors have also reaped high multiple returns.
Lei Ming stated that his two core investment judgments about Circle were: first, blockchain technology could create significant commercial and social value in the future; second, investment is about investing in the essence, and the essence of finance is licensing capability, and Circle was precisely the company with the most comprehensive licenses at that time.
Additionally, Lei Ming pointed out that blockchain was a major era beta in 2017-2018. Andto have good fund performance, one must seize the largest era beta during the investment period. Besides Circle, Lei Ming also captured opportunities in the new energy vehicle sector with NIO, and in platforms like POIZON and Pop Mart that are popular among the post-95 generation, thus maintaining an extremely high investment success rate.
Of course, the largest beta of the current era is undoubtedly AI, robotics, and globalization, which has almost become a consensus.
In mid-2023, Lei Ming, as a founding partner, established追创 Venture Capital and began organizing an ecosystem fund.
Currently,追创 Venture Capital has invested in embodied intelligence company "Magic Atom", pool robot company "Wave Future", embodied large model company "Thousand Secrets Technology", consumer-grade 3D printer company "Atomic Reshaping", and intelligent short-distance travel company "Smooth Technology" among other enterprises.
Magic Atom's universal humanoid robot and quadruped robot products
(Translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text)Blockchain is a very large track, and today there are still many applications that have not yet emerged. In fact, blockchain technology potentially can be applied in many, many fields.
Q: Did you also think it was a beta era when investing in Dewu in 2020?
Lei Ming: The biggest beta of Dewu lies in: at that time, we conducted a survey on the post-95 generation population, judging that the opportunity of that era was an investment opportunity targeting the post-95 generation.
At that time, my logic was,if you want to seize the opportunity of a major era transformation, simply put, it's nothing more than "people, goods, and venue", and among these, the "people" variable is definitely the largest. So we conducted an in-depth research on the "Z generation" at that time, and I led the team to run through 8 cities, covering first, second, third, fourth, and fifth-tier cities. After studying this generation, we selected a series of investment themes based on the post-95 generation. Therefore, we invested in Dewu when the valuation was relatively low, and today Dewu's scale and influence are already very significant.
When investing in Dewu, the mobile internet wave had already slowly receded, and after 2018, enterprises like Dewu were rare.
Overall, I think we still need to try to find those relatively large era beta opportunities, which may not necessarily be the largest, but still able to have some relatively large investment themes, such as blockchain and the post-95 generation.
Q: The current era opportunities are AI, robots, and globalization.
Lei Ming: Actually, this is the core of what we are doing at Zhui Chuang today. The biggest era opportunity next is around AI, robots, and globalization.
In other words,truly valuable good projects that can make investors earn money are actually those that can significantly improve social productivity and production efficiency through technological innovation. For example, AI and robots are driving the improvement of human productivity, so this is the biggest era opportunity.
Positioning Zhui Chuang Ecological Fund to Pursue "China to Global"
Q: Today, almost all institutions are emphasizing their investment in AI, robots, and globalization. As a newly established institution of just over 2 years, how do you ensure that you can establish a foothold in the market and even continue to lead?
Lei Ming:Our positioning is the Zhui Chuang Ecological Fund, so a major advantage is Zhui Chuang's deep industrial accumulation and comprehensive innovation incubation system—over the past years, Zhui Chuang has accumulated systematic capabilities and entrepreneurial methodologies by successfully creating mature categories. We can use this system and methodology to find opportunities globally across industries and regions, especially opportunities related to robots, and then carry out corresponding incubation.
What I want to emphasize here is that I have fully felt,the organizational management model and methodology established by Zhui Chuang are ahead of the current era, and the external perception may not be that strong and may need some time to slowly appreciate. We will open up these systematic capabilities to our incubated enterprises.
Actually,we have recently incubated many projects—on one hand, we can invest in Zhui Chuang ecosystem incubation projects at the lowest valuation first; on the other hand, compared to external projects, these projects currently have a much higher success rate in our view.Several projects have growth curves of 300-500 million revenue in the first year and 1 billion revenue in the second year, and all projects are striving to make product performance globally first, achieve profitability in the first year without burning money, which is what we emphasize internally as "global high-end".
So these projects have high stability and can rely on Zhui Chuang's already established global channels to achieve very rapid growth, and their growth potential is quite considerable.
With the perspective of the entire Zhui Chuang ecosystem, we can also extend to projects outside of Zhui Chuang incubation. For example, we can invest in some upstream projects, and at this time, we can consult Zhui Chuang's business team, such as "whether they will use these upstream technical platforms" is a relatively accurate and intuitive judgment dimension.
Additionally, we can leverage Zhui Chuang's global perspective to invest in global projects. We have already reserved some projects in Silicon Valley, in the UK, and so on.On one hand, our fund has teams overseas that can actively seek projects; on the other hand, we can also receive project recommendations through Zhui Chuang's sales team.
We are now also raising a dollar fund, but raising dollars today is different from the past—previously, the fundraising logic was that US investors were very optimistic about the Chinese economy, basically all-in China, directly handing money to top Chinese GPs to invest.
Today's external environment may have some changes, so we have been emphasizing the "China to Global" concept with dollar LPs, which is to make good use of various Chinese capabilities, including supply chain capabilities, engineer R&D capabilities, operational capabilities, etc., to achieve global layout.
Fund Returns and Ecosystem Synergy Can Be Achieved Together
Q: As a positioning ecological fund, how do you view the priority of financial returns and ecosystem synergy?
Lei Ming:From the fund's perspective, we definitely prioritize financial returns.
Ecosystem synergy is actually a natural thing. For example, during the RMB fund fundraising process, we have a cooperative relationship with our business team—because each project may be suitable for landing in different places, the business team will comprehensively consider supply chain supporting facilities, labor costs, transportation convenience, and other factors to select several most suitable landing locations, and then we go to discuss establishing a fund with these places suitable for enterprise landing.
If we first raise a fund and then forcibly require the business team to cooperate with landing and reinvestment, such a model cannot be sustainable. Essentially, both parties are in a mutually beneficial cooperative relationship, and we will also help enterprises strive for some good investment promotion policies.
Overall, which incubation project our fund specifically invests in, at what stage, and at what valuation, these are all decided by ourselves. The core starting point here is to maximize fund returns and let LPs earn money while minimizing risks. At the same time, the business team can also achieve some good results, so this is a natural process.
Fund returns and ecosystem synergy are not contradictory and can be achieved together.
Q: In the past two years, you have achieved good investment return multiples. What do you think Zhui Chuang has done well? What areas can be iteratively improved in the future?
Lei Ming:The relatively good achievements we have made in the past 2 years are largely attributed to Zhui Chuang's incubation model, entrepreneurial methodology, and reusable organizational management incentive system. The success rate of these incubation projects is naturally quite high, which is obvious.
On this basis, we have also invested in some good enterprises along the industrial upstream, whether in parts or underlying algorithms.
An important direction for our self-iteration next is to invest in globalization—from the perspective of a Chinese team, we will recruit some overseas teams in the US, UK, and other countries in reverse, gradually improving our capabilities and truly achieving "China to Global".
