Upgrade Capital

“Manus was doing wide research — what we now call agent teams or agent swarms — spinning up 10 or dozens of subagents simultaneously to execute different tasks. From what I understand, when Anthropic was building Claude Code, they actually drew on a lot of Manus's experience from building wide research.”

“We invested in Kimi, which is probably the domestic company most focused on agentic coding as a technical model company. In 2025 they completed a massive transformation and are now, we believe, possibly the world's best open-source coding model.”

“We invested in a company called Slock — it's like a Slack where humans and agents collaborate together. Their entire company operation, task management, and coding is done on their own platform. So they build Slock using Slock.”

“Liu Songming worked on large-scale collection of 5-meter [operation] data for model training — almost simultaneously with Jenialist — as well as Agentic RL work. They also have strong entrepreneurial spirit.”

“Ding Ning — Tsinghua professor, author of Simple VLA series — mentioned alongside Liu Songming as a next-generation young academic entrepreneur from Tsinghua with high research impact and strong founder qualities.”

“He started by making a very high-torque motor, then discovered that hands were crucially important — at a time when very few people were making hands, and even fewer were making high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands.”