Dialogue with Circle investor Lei Ming: Behind the continuous acquisition of high-return projects, striving to continuously capture the era's beta.

Author: Stone Jin

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 under the stock code "CRCL", becoming the "world's first publicly traded stablecoin."

Two trading days later, Circle's share price has risen 247.42% from the issue price, with a market capitalization of about $24 billion. In fact, in this IPO offering, Circle has raised the number of shares and the issue price several times, and finally raised $1.1 billion, which was oversubscribed by more than 25 times.

Behind the most talked-about large IPO of 2025 so far, there are several investors with Chinese backgrounds. Among them, Lei Ming, who was an investor at Huaxing New Economy Fund, invested in Circle in 2018. With Circle's listing, these early investors have also reaped high multiples of investment returns.

Leiming stated that his two core investment judgments regarding Circle were: first, the blockchain technology will create significant commercial and social value in the future; second, investment must focus on essence, and the essence of finance is licensing capability, while Circle happened to be the one with the most comprehensive licenses at that time.

In addition, Lei Ming pointed out that blockchain was a very large era beta from 2017 to 2018. To achieve good fund performance, one must seize the largest era beta during the investment period. Besides Circle, the era opportunities that Lei Ming seized at that time included NIO in the new energy vehicle sector and popular brands among post-95s such as Dewu and Pop Mart, which helped maintain a very high investment success rate.

Of course, the biggest beta in this era is undoubtedly AI, robotics, and globalization, which has almost become a consensus.

In mid-2023, Lei Ming, as a founding partner, established Zhui Chuang Venture Capital, starting the formation of the Chasing Ecology Fund.

Currently, Zhui Chuang Venture has invested in several companies including the embodied intelligence company "Magic Atom", the pool robot company "Surge Future", the embodied large model company "Qian Jue Technology", the consumer-grade 3D printer company "Atom Reconstruct", and the smart short-distance travel company "Tan Tu Technology".

Universal humanoid robots and quadruped robots of magic atoms

Leiming emphasized that the core competitiveness of the Chasing Ecology Fund comes from the empowerment of the Chasing Incubation ecosystem: on one hand, Chuang can prioritize investment in projects incubated by Chasing Ecology at the optimal valuation, ensuring the stability and high growth potential of the projects; on the other hand, relying on the industry insights of the Chasing Ecology, the fund can also expand investments in high-quality external projects to achieve ecological synergy.

According to Lei Ming, he and his team are now also raising a dollar fund and continuously emphasizing the concept of "China to Global" to dollar LPs, which means making good use of China's comprehensive capabilities in various fields and believing that Chinese people have the strength to "achieve results" globally.

It is worth adding that in August 2024, Zhui Chuang Venture Capital announced the establishment of the industry venture capital fund and completed the first closing of a RMB fund. It is reported that within six months, the fund achieved oversubscription, with a MOIC of 2.5 times, and 100% of the projects in the fund achieved at least a doubling of their valuations.

Leiming stated, "Our next important direction is to invest in globalization - from the perspective of a Chinese team, we are looking to recruit some overseas teams in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, gradually enhancing our capabilities in this area, and truly achieving 'China to Global'."

As Circle officially lists on the New York Stock Exchange, Lei Ming shared with "IPO Early Insight" the core logic behind his investment in Circle seven years ago, as well as some thoughts and outlook after founding Chasing Innovation Capital.

The following is a selection of highlights from the conversation between Leiming and "IPO Early Insights":

Investment is all about investing in the "essence".

Q: You invested in Circle 7 years ago, what was your reasoning at that time?

Thunder: In 2018, shortly after I joined Huaxing, blockchain was one of the sectors I was covering. I personally recognized the underlying logic of blockchain, and I also believe that blockchain technology can create significant commercial and social value in the future. But frankly speaking, blockchain was still in its early development stage at that time, and many laws and regulations were unclear, so we tried to choose projects that we believed were compliant and allowed by risk control to invest in, after all, we still had to consider the exit strategy for an eventual listing.

Q: The fact that Circle has reached a market value of over 20 billion USD by today is probably a bit unexpected.

Thunder: To be honest, there is a certain element of luck involved—at that time, Circle's main business was not stablecoins; they had just begun to venture into this area. Additionally, when Circle went public, it coincided with the United States and Hong Kong gradually introducing legislation regarding stablecoins, which directly contributed to the success of Circle's issuance. Of course, its future potential is also very large; these things did not exist seven years ago.

But at that time, we had a basic judgment, and it was also our consensus - finance is still essentially a licensed business. When a new thing comes out, it may not have time to put the supervision in place, and anyone can make some achievements in the era of reckless growth; However, in the long run, the financial industry must become more and more compliant, and it must be in compliance with regulatory conditions before it can operate for a long time, so the ability to license has become particularly critical, which we were very sure of at that time, and Circle is the one with the most complete licenses.

Q: The Circle project is relatively niche, at least for traditional investment institutions. From this project, have you summarized any experiences that can be reused in future investment processes?

Thunder: I summarize it roughly into four points:

First of all, when we invest, we should try to embrace the opportunities brought by new technologies. I should be considered one of the first to "eat crabs" by investing in blockchain within traditional financial institutions. Therefore, when these transformative technologies emerge, we need to maintain long-term attention, continuously follow them, and constantly learn new things and explore new directions.

Secondly, even if you see something new in a certain industry, it's still important to return to the underlying logic. The core of investment ultimately comes down to investing in essence. Just like I mentioned before, the success of the Circle case is still due to our understanding and grasp of the essence of the financial industry, which is the "license."

Third, the perspective of globalization. Seven years ago, there weren't as many peers discussing "globalization", but at that time, when I talked to the founder of Circle, I felt that he had a global mindset. For a company to truly succeed, it must embrace globalization, which is multi-faceted, including the globalization of capital, the globalization of markets, the globalization of supply chains, and the globalization of talent, among others. I believe that a strong optimism about globalization is also a major factor in the success of this case.

Finally, invest in founders who have faith and strong beliefs. When something new emerges, there will definitely be many changes, and the market will become quite restless. At this time, you should invest in founders who are very certain and have strong faith in what they are doing within this sector. If a founder lacks faith and frequently changes their mind, they are unlikely to build an excellent company.

Seize the big opportunities of the era as much as possible.

Q: You mentioned before that "the performance of the fund essentially depends on whether we can capture the greatest era beta during the investment period." At that time, investing in NIO can be considered one of the biggest opportunities of the era, but can Circle also be classified as such? How do we find projects outside of these major era opportunities?

Thunder: I don't think so, I believe blockchain can also be considered a very large beta from 2017 to 2018.

Blockchain is a very large field, and to this day there are still many applications that have not been developed. In fact, blockchain technology has the potential to be applied in many, many areas.

Q: Was it also considered the era of beta when investing in goods in 2020?

Thunder: The biggest beta of Dewu is that we conducted a survey on the post-95 generation at that time, determining that the investment opportunities of that era were aimed at the post-95 generation.

At that time, my logic was that if we wanted to seize the opportunities of the great changes of the era, simply put, it boiled down to "people, goods, and venues", among which the variable "people" is definitely the largest. So we conducted an in-depth study on the "Z generation", and I led the team to visit 8 cities, covering first, second, third, fourth, and fifth-tier cities. After studying this generation, we filtered out a series of investment themes based on those born after 1995. Therefore, we invested in Dewu when its valuation was relatively low, and today, Dewu's scale and influence have become very large.

By the time the item was obtained, the wave of mobile internet had slowly receded, and after 2018, there were very few companies similar to DeWu that emerged.

Overall, I think we should try to find opportunities with relatively high era beta as much as possible. They may not necessarily be the largest, but there are still some significant investment themes, such as blockchain and the post-95 generation.

Q: The opportunities of the current era are AI, robotics, and globalization.

Thunder: In fact, this is also the core of our pursuit of innovation today. The biggest opportunity in the next era will revolve around AI, robotics, and globalization.

In other words, truly valuable projects that can help investors make money are those that can significantly enhance social productivity and improve production efficiency through technological innovation. For example, AI and robotics are driving the increase of human productivity, so this represents the greatest opportunity of our time.

Positioning Search for Ecological Fund

Pursuing 'China to Global'

Q: Almost all institutions today emphasize their investment in AI, robotics, and globalization. As a new institution that has just been established for more than two years, how can we ensure that we can establish ourselves in the market and even maintain a leading position?

Leiming: Our positioning is the Chasing Echo Ecological Fund, so one of our significant advantages lies in Chasing Echo's deep industrial accumulation and完善的创新孵化体系 — Over the past few years, Chasing Echo has successfully built mature categories and accumulated systematic capabilities and entrepreneurial methodologies. We can leverage this system and methodology to seek opportunities globally across industries and regions, especially related to robotics, and then carry out corresponding incubation.

One point I want to emphasize here is that I have personally felt that the organizational management model and methodology established by Chasing have led the current era. The external perception may not be that strong, and it may take some time to gradually appreciate it. We will open these systematic capabilities to our incubated enterprises.

In fact, we have incubated a lot of projects recently - on the one hand, we can invest in the projects incubated by the Dreame ecosystem with the lowest valuation as soon as possible; On the other hand, these projects have a much higher success rate than other projects. The growth curve of several projects is a model of 3 to 500 million revenue in the first year and 1 billion revenue in the second year, and all projects strive to achieve the world's first product performance at the very beginning, and achieve profitability in the first year without burning money, which is the "global high-end" that we emphasize internally.

Therefore, the stability of these projects is very high, and they can achieve very rapid growth relying on the global channels that Chasing has already established, making their growth potential quite considerable.

A wireless pool robot product developed by Surge Future.

With the perspective of the entire ecosystem of Zhaomi, we can also extend our investments to projects beyond those incubated by Zhaomi. For example, we can invest in some upstream projects, and at this time, we can consult Zhaomi's business team. For instance, asking "Will they use these upstream technology platforms?" is a relatively accurate and intuitive judgment dimension.

In addition, we can leverage ZuiMi's global perspective to invest in projects worldwide. We have already accumulated some projects in Silicon Valley, in the UK, and so on. On one hand, our fund has teams overseas that can actively seek out projects; on the other hand, we can also have ZuiMi's sales team recommend projects they come across to us.

We are also raising a USD fund now, but raising USD today is quite different from the past - the fundraising logic in the past was that USD investors were very optimistic about the Chinese economy, basically all in on China, directly handing money to top Chinese GPs for them to invest.

Today, there may be some changes in the external environment, so we have been emphasizing the concept of "China to Global" with the US dollar LP, which means making good use of China's various capabilities, including supply chain capabilities, engineering R&D capabilities, operational capabilities, etc., to achieve a global layout.

Fund returns and ecological synergy can be achieved together.

Q: When positioning an ecological fund, how should one view the priority between financial returns and ecological synergy?

Thunder: From the perspective of the fund, we are definitely oriented towards financial returns as our primary goal.

Ecological synergy is actually a natural thing. For example, in the process of raising funds for the RMB fund, we have a collaborative relationship with our business team—because the places suitable for each project to land may vary. The business team will comprehensively consider factors such as supply chain support, labor costs, and transportation convenience to select a few of the most suitable places for landing. Then we will discuss the establishment of the fund with these places that are suitable for enterprises to land.

If we are the ones raising the funds first and then forcibly requiring the business team to cooperate in implementing the reinvestment, this kind of model cannot be sustainable. Essentially, both parties are in a mutually beneficial partnership, and we will also help the enterprise secure some favorable investment promotion policies.

In general, which incubation project our fund specifically invests in, at what stage, and at what valuation, are all decisions made by us. The core starting point here is to maximize the fund's returns and allow LPs to make money while minimizing risks as much as possible. At the same time, the business team can also achieve some good results, so this is all a natural outcome.

Fund returns and ecological synergy are not contradictory and can be achieved together.

Q: In these past two years, you have achieved good investment return multiples. In your opinion, in which areas do you think Chuang has performed well? What are the areas that can still be iterated and improved upon?

Leiming: The relatively good results we have achieved in the past two years are largely attributable to the incubation model, entrepreneurial methodology, and reusable organizational management incentive system of ZhuiMi. The success rate of these incubation projects is naturally quite high, which is evident.

On this basis, we have also invested in some good companies upstream in the industry, whether in components or underlying algorithms.

Next, one of the important directions for our self-iteration is to invest in globalization - from the perspective of a Chinese team, we are looking to recruit some overseas teams in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, gradually improving our capabilities in this regard, and truly achieving "China to Global."