Today, Gaocheng Capital portfolio companies Momenta (06880.HK) and EACON Mining Technology (07687.HK) made their public market debuts on the same day. This marks an important milestone in the development of two world-class Physical AI leaders, as well as a significant validation of Gaocheng Capital’s long-term conviction and systematic investment in the sector.
From intelligent driving for passenger vehicles and autonomous mining to urban delivery, long-haul logistics, robotics and embodied intelligence, Gaocheng Capital has built a systematic Physical AI portfolio around the long-term transition of AI from the digital world into the physical world.
We have long believed that Physical AI will be a major driver of AI commercialization, enabling a new generation of world-class technology companies from China to serve global markets.
From Enterprise AI to Physical AI: Gaocheng Capital’s Long-Term Conviction in AI Commercialization
Gaocheng Capital has long focused on B2B technology, with a consistent emphasis on how innovation can be embedded into real-world industry workflows and translated into customer value, commercial moats and sustainable competitive advantage. Over the years, we have built a systematic portfolio of leading Enterprise AI companies in China, while also investing early in the next wave of industrial transformation created by the convergence of AI and the physical world.
In our view, the evolution of AI will not stop at information processing, content generation, or improvements in software productivity. The far greater opportunity lies in AI’s ability to operate in the real world: to perceive and understand its environment, make decisions, control machines and execute tasks across complex physical settings. Whether it is a passenger vehicle navigating public roads, autonomous haulage trucks operating in mines, unmanned vehicles completing urban deliveries or robots performing tasks in real-world environments, each represents the same fundamental transition—from digital intelligence to physical intelligence.
This thesis underpins Gaocheng Capital’s long-standing and expanding commitment to Physical AI.
Physical AI places significantly greater demands across technology, engineering, data, supply chains, domain expertise and commercial execution. Competition is defined not by the performance of any single model, but by integrated capabilities across perception, prediction, planning, control, hardware, systems engineering, operational deployment and customer ROI.
This is where Gaocheng Capital’s accumulated expertise in B2B software, enterprise services and AI commercialization becomes a differentiated advantage in Physical AI investing. Our investment lens assesses not only breakthroughs in underlying technologies, but also whether those technologies can be embedded into real business workflows and translated into scalable commercial value. We evaluate not only improvements in model capabilities, but also whether companies can build sustainable data flywheels, deliver measurable customer ROI and establish enduring competitive moats.
Recognizing Momenta’s Physical AI Potential Early—and Backing Its Long-Term Evolution
In autonomous driving, Gaocheng Capital recognized at an early stage the value of the new generation of AI companies represented by Momenta. We did not view Momenta simply as an autonomous driving algorithm company. Rather, we understood its long-term potential through the lens of Physical AI: Momenta’s core capability lies not only in enabling vehicles to interpret the road, but also in using data-driven development, continuous model iteration and large-scale production deployment to allow AI to learn and evolve in real-world traffic environments, ultimately building intelligent systems designed for the physical world.
This understanding has underpinned Gaocheng Capital’s long-standing conviction in Momenta.
Autonomous driving is one of the earliest Physical AI applications to undergo commercial validation at scale. It operates in a highly complex and dynamic real-world environment characterized by a vast number of long-tail scenarios, requiring systems to combine advanced perception and decision-making with strong engineering capabilities and robust safety redundancy. More importantly, progress in autonomous driving depends heavily on a closed-loop data system: the greater the number of production vehicles deployed, the richer the scenario data, the faster the model iteration, the stronger the system performance, and the clearer the value delivered to customers.
Momenta has consistently pursued a data-driven technology roadmap. By creating synergies between mass-production intelligent driving solutions and the development of more advanced autonomous driving capabilities, the company has progressively built a reinforcing flywheel across technology, data, customers and commercialization. Gaocheng Capital backed this direction from an early stage and has remained a long-term partner as Momenta advanced its technology roadmap, scaled commercial deployment and deepened its partnerships across the automotive industry.
Momenta’s public market debut is the result of its long-term commitment to technological innovation and commercial execution and further validates autonomous driving as one of the most important commercial applications of Physical AI.
From Momenta to EACON, Neolix and Zeron: Gaocheng Capital’s Systematic Investment Across Core Autonomous Driving Applications
Rather than concentrating on a single company or application, Gaocheng Capital has built a systematic and forward-looking portfolio across the core commercial scenarios of autonomous driving.
In intelligent driving for passenger vehicles, Gaocheng Capital invested in Momenta at an early stage and has supported the company over the long term as it brings advanced intelligent driving capabilities into large-scale production deployment.
In autonomous mining, Gaocheng Capital invested in EACON, a global leader in autonomous driving solutions for mining operations. Through deployment in high-value, closed and semi-closed production environments, EACON has demonstrated how autonomous driving can materially improve safety, operating efficiency and production reliability.
Mining represents a particularly compelling application, with clear customer demand, significant operational value, and strong potential for scalable deployment. By developing deep domain expertise, accumulating proprietary real-world operating data and using scaled deployment to drive compounding improvements in technology and operations, EACON has become a benchmark for Physical AI commercialization in industrial settings.
As deployment has scaled, EACON’s algorithms, operating capabilities and customer value proposition have continued to strengthen, translating technological progress into a market share of more than 50%
In autonomous urban delivery, Gaocheng Capital led an investment in Neolix, the world’s largest operator of L4 autonomous delivery vehicles. At a critical point in the company’s development—when market views on autonomous delivery remained divided—Gaocheng Capital stepped forward with conviction to lead the round and support Neolix through the industry cycle.
This was a defining moment for us. At a time when the market remained divided on the outlook for autonomous delivery, Gaocheng Capital firmly backed an outstanding entrepreneurial team based on our assessment of Neolix’s technological progress, increasingly compelling customer ROI, expanding operating network and potential to build durable competitive moats at scale. Today, Neolix has become a category-defining company in autonomous urban logistics, driving scaled deployment across increasingly diverse real-world delivery scenarios.
In intelligent long-haul logistics, Gaocheng Capital led an investment in Zeron, focusing on the long-term opportunities arising from the application of autonomous driving technologies to bulk freight, long-distance transportation, and logistics efficiency. Long-haul logistics is a vast segment of China’s real economy with substantial scope for efficiency gains, and it is poised to become an important area in which Physical AI delivers meaningful industrial value.
Zeron has adopted a clean-sheet approach to the electrification and intelligent design of heavy-duty trucks, while rapidly expanding its delivery volumes. As the scale of its autonomous fleet continues to grow, the company will be able to accumulate more real-world operating data, enhance the capabilities of its autonomous driving models, and further unlock the long-term value of intelligent long-haul logistics through a full-stack autonomous transportation solution.
In autonomous driving infrastructure, Gaocheng Capital has also invested in Xheart, extending its Physical AI portfolio into a critical layer of the technology stack. As autonomous driving evolves from rule-based systems to data-driven intelligence, and from modular architectures to end-to-end models, vehicles require increasingly powerful, energy-efficient and reliable onboard computing platforms.
The autonomous driving compute infrastructure developed by Xheart not only provides a critical foundation for the continuous evolution of intelligent driving systems, but also has the potential to extend into a broader range of Physical AI applications. Whether in autonomous driving, unmanned delivery, intelligent logistics, robotics or embodied intelligence, intelligent agents operating in the physical world must perform perception, understanding, planning and control under tight energy constraints, complex environmental conditions and real-time decision-making requirements.
Efficient computing platforms purpose-built for physical intelligence will therefore become one of the critical infrastructure layers underpinning the long-term development of the Physical AI industry.
From Momenta and EACON to Neolix and Zeron, Gaocheng Capital’s autonomous driving portfolio spans several critical application scenarios, including passenger vehicles, mining operations, urban delivery and long-haul logistics. Although these companies serve different markets, they share the same underlying logic: using AI to understand and act upon the physical world, applying technological progress to improve industrial efficiency, and building enduring advantages in data, operating scenarios, customers and scale over time.
From Autonomous Driving to Robotics: The Next Phase of Physical AI Is Taking Shape
In Gaocheng Capital’s view, autonomous driving represents only the first chapter in the large-scale deployment of Physical AI. As foundation models, multimodal models, world models, simulation systems, dexterous manipulation, core components, and data-acquisition infrastructure continue to advance, robotics and embodied intelligence are emerging as another major application of Physical AI.
If autonomous driving enables AI to navigate roads, mines, industrial parks and cities, robotics requires AI to go further—performing manipulation, interaction and task execution in more open, complex and unstructured environments. This places significantly greater demands on models, data, robotic platforms, actuators, sensors and system control—while opening a vast long-term industrial opportunity.
Gaocheng Capital has already invested in representative embodied intelligence leaders such as RobotERA and will continue to build exposure across key areas of the value chain, including robotic platforms, critical components, data collection, model training, simulation platforms, and industry applications. We We believe the robotics industry is following a path similar to the early evolution of autonomous driving, but at an accelerated pace: from technology validation to product definition, from isolated demonstrations to real-world applications, from engineering prototypes to scaled delivery, and from capability breakthroughs to commercially viable business models.
Throughout this process, Gaocheng Capital will remain committed to its investment approach: assessing both technological and commercial inflection points; evaluating not only models and hardware, but also customer demand, data flywheels, supply-chain capabilities and scalable delivery; and supporting both platform companies with the potential to develop general-purpose capabilities and entrepreneurial teams building durable competitive advantages in critical bottlenecks and high-value vertical applications.
Backing Chinese Entrepreneurs to Become Global Leaders
The listings of Momenta and EACON on the same day represent an important milestone in Gaocheng Capital’s Physical AI strategy—but only one step in a much longer journey.
Over the past several years, Chinese technology entrepreneurs have demonstrated strong global competitiveness across autonomous driving, autonomous delivery, autonomous mining, robotics and intelligent manufacturing. China offers some of the world’s most complex, diverse and high-frequency real-world operating scenarios, supported by deep engineering capabilities, comprehensive supply chains and strong commercial execution. For Physical AI, these strengths provide an exceptionally fertile industrial foundation.
Gaocheng Capital has long believed that China will produce a new generation of world-leading Physical AI companies. These companies will not only lead their respective markets in China but also have the potential to define new products, technology roadmaps, and business models globally.
The public market debuts of Momenta and EACON today provide further validation of this long-term conviction. Looking ahead, as underlying model capabilities continue to advance, data flywheels become more robust, hardware platforms mature, and commercial applications expand, Physical AI will achieve scaled deployment across an increasing range of real-world scenarios.
Gaocheng Capital will continue to build around the two core pillars of autonomous driving and robotics, further expanding its Physical AI portfolio and backing exceptional Chinese entrepreneurs as they build category-defining global technology leaders in the next wave of industrial transformation.
