2020.10.28 CoStone Capital Views:
SmartMore, a China's AI computer vision solution provider for industrial manufacturing, completed a USD 100 million Series A financing round, becoming the youngest “quasi-unicorn” AI company. CoStone Capital is one of the investors.
SmartMore targets pain points and difficulties met by manufacturers and the ultra HD video industry with its leading AI technologies. Over 20 years of profound research and application of computer vision lends SmartMore the capacity to give smart manufacturing innovative solutions of Smore ViMo and ultra HD videos the Smore Media. Both are under the framework of the newest AI technologies and applicable to complicated scenarios of various kinds. With universality, great performance, rapid deployability, and soft-hardware coordination, these two solutions bring AI to industrial frontlines and directly serve the national strategy of High-Quality Development.
SMore ViMo Smart Manufacturing & SMore MediaUltra HD Video AI Solutions
SmartMore now is trading with over 100 clients from high-end consumer electronics, new energy, automotive, video content production and providing. Besides, SmartMore has also cooperated with multiple national and international Fortune 500 companies, phone and smart device giants around the world. These cooperation have made vision technology a universal existence in tens of millions of industrial and consumer goods from hundreds of production lines.
SmartMore’s staff is scaling up in the recent half-year. R&D and business centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hongkong, and Suzhou are just the start of SmartMore’s national layout. SmartMore will recruit more researchers, developers, and salespeople of the highest possible caliber to beef up its core team and serve its high-speed development.
Meanwhile, the company is making a presence in the international market. As multiple overseas projects being launched, SmartMore’s AI technology first makes its way to fields of movie and media, ports and logistics, and public services. In November, SmartMore Japan Ltd. will be founded in Tokyo to extend its international market presence.
CoStone Capital chairman Zhangwei: “SmartMore Speed” is enabled by its superb implementation of cutting-edge technologies. Even when AI is returning to the rational development track, SmartMore’s solid academic and industrial background will help it keep a foothold. SmartMore’s excellent technologies, rich industry resources, and its winning over a lot of benchmarking clients convince us of its ability to bring AI into realties. We see a bright and promising future in this company and we are indeed proud to empower this unicorn.
Looking forward to the good news!
Rewritten by: Chen Cong, Edited by: Du Zhixin, Li Yunzhen
Over the past year, the bull market returned, with technology leading the way.
As I said back in October 2024, the rally that began on September 24 was not merely a rebound, but a reversal. Since then, China's capital markets have undergone a broad revaluation, moving from undervaluation toward fair value.
The Shanghai Composite Index reached its highest level in a decade. The "Yi-Zhong-Tian" trio—Eoptolink, Zhongji Innolight and TFC Communication, three prominent Chinese optical communications stocks—saw their share prices multiply severalfold in a single year. Cambricon's market capitalization briefly exceeded RMB 600 billion. Elsewhere in the technology sector, triple-digit price-to-earnings ratios and valuations exceeding RMB 10 billion became commonplace.
Some investors were greedy; others, fearful. Still others asked me: Are technology stocks in a valuation bubble?
My answer is that what we are witnessing is the hunger and anxiety of an era, reflected in the capital markets. Once you understand this, the current fervor for technology investing is no longer difficult to explain.
Investment has nothing to do with macroeconomics, but everything to do with geopolitics.
China-US relations will shape the investment landscape for decades to come. Geopolitics has played a major role in shaping the hunger and anxiety of our times, fundamentally reshaping the way we invest.
What, then, lies at the heart of China's hunger and anxiety?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is already underway, yet China has not fully overcome the technological shortcomings left by the Third. There is no time to lose.
This is why some people wonder: Why do Chinese computing chip companies command such high valuations when their technologies still lag so far behind NVIDIA's? Why does NVIDIA trade at just 50 times earnings, while a company hailed as "China's answer to NVIDIA" commands a multiple of 300?
To me, this gets the logic exactly backward.
It is precisely because these companies cannot catch up with NVIDIA in the near term that they command a higher strategic premium. The wider the technological gap, the greater the strategic value.
The further something lies beyond our reach, the stronger our hunger. The harder it is to catch up, the deeper our anxiety. If China were to achieve a complete breakthrough in computing chips one day, valuations might actually come down.
Where can one find China's most spectacular natural landscapes?
Much of the answer, I believe, lies in and around the Hengduan Mountains: the Meili Snow Mountains, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Mount Gongga, Mount Siguniang, Jiuzhaigou, and many others. Vast differences in elevation and deep fault lines have given rise to landscapes of extraordinary grandeur.
Hard-tech investing follows a similar logic.
Technological gaps, discontinuities in capabilities, and missing links in industrial systems: a leap in difficulty brings a leap in valuation, and a successful breakthrough can, in turn, bring a leap in returns.
This logic extends well beyond computing chips. It is equally evident in memory semiconductors, commercial spaceflight, and other sectors where China still faces substantial technological gaps with other countries.
It was precisely this conviction that led CoStone Capital, starting in 2016, to decisively focus its investments on three areas: hard tech, emerging industries, and life sciences and healthcare. In this context, "hard tech" refers specifically to important industries in which China faces a technological gap with the United States.
Thanks to this forward-looking strategy, CoStone Capital established an early presence across the full value chains of key sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Looking ahead, the frontiers of technological progress and industrial upgrading are boundless. Nor can the gaps in hard technology be closed overnight. The twin windows of opportunity presented by technological innovation and the development of homegrown alternatives to foreign technologies have only just begun to open.
The road ahead is long, but the future holds immense promise.
As an investment firm, CoStone Capital will continue to invest where the hunger and anxiety of each era run deepest, move forward with the tensions that shape our times, and extend our reach toward the most challenging—and most important—frontiers.
Spring 2026