Hardcore tech startups to get 1tn yuan boost

Themis Qi

China state economic planner yesterday said it plans to roll out a venture capital fund worth 1 trillion yuan (HK$1.07 trillion) to support startups in burgeoning industries that include artificial intelligence.

The news came as a team of mainland tech developers launched a new AI agent called Manus that excited a market still reveling in the success of DeepSeek, which shook stock markets during its January launch.

Revealing the "national venture capital guidance fund" at a press conference in Beijing yesterday, National Development and Reform Commission chairman Zheng Shanjie said it will focus on "hardcore technologies" like AI, quantum technology and hydrogen energy storage and will also channel funds to biomanufacturing, embodied AI, 6G and other fields mentioned in this year's work report.

It will invest in seed-stage firms and startups to make breakthroughs in original and disruptive technological innovations and incubate strategic emerging sectors and future industries.

The fund has a 20-year time horizon, longer than most equity investment funds, according to the NDRC.

At the same briefing, People's Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng said the central bank will increase the size of a tech-focused relending program to as much as 1 trillion yuan from the current 500 billion yuan and lower interest rates.

Meanwhile, the AI agent Manus went viral on Chinese social media, as it can solve various complex tasks like a human assistant instead of just offering suggestions or answers.

In a demo video released by developer Monica.im, Manus ranked the candidates after analyzing their resumes, selected suitable properties in New York according to the user's requirements and analyzed the relevance among the stocks of Nvidia, Marvell Technology and TSMC.

A chart on Monica.im's website shows that the product outperformed US giant OpenAI's Deep Research across all three difficulty levels in the General AI Assistants benchmark, a third-party evaluation system for AI agents.

Founder Xiao Hong was born after 1990, and is younger than Liang Wenfeng, whose startup DeepSeek once triggered a sell-off of Nvidia's shares with its low-cost AI model.

Manus can be accessed only by invitation code for the moment, and no details about charges have been released. Notably, OpenAI is reportedly planning to charge up to US$20,000 (HK$156,000) per month for specialized AI "agents," according to The Information.

In other news, the PBOC will cut the required reserve ratio and policy interest rates at the appropriate time according to the sentiment of financial markets and the economic situation at home and overseas. Minister of Finance Lan Foan said Beijing has reserved ample fiscal policy tools to navigate the potential uncertainties that could appear domestically and internationally.