Dialogue with Circle investor Lei Ming: Strive to continuously capture the beta of the times

Lei Ming founded Zhuichuang Venture Capital as a founding partner in mid-2023 and began to pursue the establishment of an ecological fund.

On the evening of June 5, 2025, Beijing time, Circle Internet Group (hereinafter referred to as "Circle") was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the stock code "CRCL", becoming the "first stock of global stablecoin".

Two trading days later, Circle's stock price has risen by 247.42% from the issue price, with a market value of approximately US$24 billion. In fact, in this IPO issuance, Circle has repeatedly raised the number of shares issued and the issue price, and finally raised US$1.1 billion, and received more than 25 times oversubscription.

Behind this large IPO, which has been the most talked-about so far in 2025, there are many investors with Chinese backgrounds. Among them, Lei Ming, who was then an investor of Huaxing New Economy Fund, invested in Circle in 2018. With the listing of Circle, these early investors also reaped high returns on their investment.

Lei Ming said that his two core investment judgments on Circle were: first, blockchain technology can create very large commercial and social value in the future; second, investment is to invest in essence, the essence of finance is license capability, and Circle happened to be the one with the most complete licenses at the time.

In addition, Lei Ming pointed out that blockchain was a very large era beta in 2017-2018. AndIf you want a good fund performance, you must seize the biggest era beta in the investment period. In addition to Circle, Lei Ming also seized the era opportunities in the field of new energy vehicles, such as Weilai, and Douyin and Pop Mart, which are favored by the post-95s, thus maintaining a very high investment success rate.

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

In mid-2023, Lei Ming founded Zhuichuang Venture Capital as a founding partner and began to pursue the establishment of the Ecological Fund.

Currently, Zhuichuang Venture Capital has invested in many companies, including the embodied intelligence company "Magic Atom", the swimming pool robot company "Surge Future", the embodied large model company "Qianjue Technology", the consumer-grade 3D printer company "Atom Reshaping", and the smart short-distance travel company "Tandu Technology".

Magic Atom's universal humanoid robot and quadruped robot products

Lei Ming emphasized that the core competitiveness of the Dreame Ecological Fund comes from the empowerment of the Dreame incubation ecosystem:On the one hand, Zhuichuang can give priority to investing in projects incubated by the Dreame ecosystem at the best valuation to ensure the stability and high growth potential of the projects; on the other hand, relying on the industry insights of the Dreame ecosystem, the fund can also expand investment in external high-quality projects to achieve ecological synergy.

According to Lei Ming, he and his team are also raising US dollar funds and continue to emphasize the concept of "China to Global" to US dollar LPs, that is, to make good use of China's comprehensive capabilities in various fields and to believe that the Chinese have the ability to "make achievements" globally.

Here I might as well add that,In August 2024, Zhuichuang Venture Capital announced the establishment of the industry venture capital fund and completed the first phase of the first RMB fund. It is reported that in half a year, the fund was oversubscribed, MOIC reached 2.5 times, and 100% of the projects in the fund achieved at least doubled valuations.

Lei Ming said, “One of our important directions in the future is to invest in globalization. We will stand from the perspective of a Chinese team and recruit some overseas teams in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries to gradually improve our capabilities in this area and truly achieve ‘China to Global’.”

When Circle officially landed on the New York Stock Exchange, Lei Ming shared with “IPO Early Knowledge” the core logic of his investment in Circle seven years ago, as well as some of his thoughts and prospects after founding Zhuichuang Venture Capital.

The following is a selection of the conversation between Lei Ming and "IPO Early Knowledge":

Investment is about investing in "essence"

Q: You invested in Circle 7 years ago. What was your judgment logic at the time?

Lei Ming:I had just joined Huaxing in 2018, and blockchain was one of the tracks I covered at the time. I personally recognize the underlying logic of blockchain, and I also believe that blockchain technology will create very large commercial and social value in the future. But frankly speaking, the blockchain was still in its early stages of development, and many laws and regulations were unclear, so we tried to choose projects that we thought were compliant and risk-controlled, after all, we still had to consider going public and exiting.

Q: It is a bit unexpected that Circle has a market value of more than 20 billion US dollars today.

Lei Ming: To be honest, there was a certain amount of luck - at that time, Circle's main business was not stablecoins, and they had just started this business. In addition, when Circle issued its IPO, the United States and Hong Kong successively introduced bills on stablecoins, which directly led to the success of Circle's issuance. Of course, it also has great potential in the future. Seven years ago, none of these existed.

But at that time, we had a basic judgment, which was also our consensus - finance is essentially a license business. When a new thing comes out, supervision may not have been in place in time. In the era of grassroots growth, anyone can make some achievements; but in the long run, the financial industry must be more and more compliant, and must be able to operate in the long term under the conditions of compliance with supervision, so the license capacity becomes particularly critical. This is what we were very sure of at the time. Circle is the one with the most licenses.

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

Lei Ming:I can roughly summarize it into four points:

First, when we make investments, we should try our best to embrace the opportunities brought by new technologies. I should be considered the first wave of "pioneers" in investing in blockchain in traditional financial institutions. So when these transformative technologies come, we need to keep paying attention and following them for a long time, and we must continue to learn new things and research new directions.

Second, even if we see something new in a certain industry, we still have to return to the underlying logic. The core of investment is to invest in the essence.As I just said, the success of the Circle case is due to the fact that we have seen through and grasped the essence of the financial industry, the "license".

Third, the perspective of globalization. There were not so many peers who talked about "globalization" 7 years ago, but when I talked with the founder of Circle at that time, I felt that he had a global mindset.

If a company wants to truly win, it must embrace globalization, and globalization in many aspects, including the globalization of funds, the globalization of markets, the globalization of supply chains, the globalization of talents, etc.

I think the firm optimism about globalization is also a major factor in the success of this case.

Finally, we should invest in founders who have faith and conviction. When a new thing appears, there will definitely be many changes, and the market will also be quite impetuous. At this time, we should invest in founders who are very sure and have faith in what they do in this track. If the founder lacks faith and changes frequently, it is highly likely that he will not be able to build an excellent company.

Seize the biggest opportunities of the times

Q: You mentioned before that "fund performance essentially depends on whether it can capture the biggest beta of the times during the investment period." The Weilai you invested in at that time can be said to be one of the biggest opportunities of the times, but can Circle also be called one? How to find projects other than these big opportunities of the times?

Lei Ming:I don't think so. I think blockchain can also be said to be a very big beta in 2017-2018.

Blockchain is a very large track. To this day, there are still many applications that have not been launched. In fact, blockchain technology can potentially be applied in many, many fields.

Q: When you invested in Dewu in 2020, did you also think it was a beta of the times?

Lei Ming:Dewu’s biggest beta is that: at that time we conducted a survey on the post-95s population, and determined that the opportunity of that era was an investment opportunity for the post-95s population.

At that time, my logic was thatif you want to seize the opportunity of the great changes of the times, to put it simply, it is nothing more than "people, goods, and places", among which the variable "people" is definitely the largest.

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So we did an in-depth survey on the "Z generation" at that time, and I led the team to 8 cities, covering first-, second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-tier cities. After we studied this generation, we selected a series of investment themes based on the post-95 generation. Therefore, we invested in Dewu when the valuation was relatively low. Today, Dewu has become very large in size and influence.

When we invested in Dewu, the wave of mobile Internet had gradually subsided, and there were very few companies like Dewu that emerged after 2018.

Overall, I think we should try to find those opportunities with relatively large era betas. They may not be the largest, but there are still some relatively large investment themes, such as blockchain and the post-95 generation.

Q: The current era opportunities are AI, robots and globalization.

Lei Ming:Actually, this is also the core of our pursuit of innovation today. The biggest opportunities of the times are around AI, robots and globalization.

In other words,real valuable projects, projects that can make investors money, are actually those projects that can significantly improve social productivity and production efficiency through technological innovation. For example, AI and robots are promoting the improvement of human productivity, so this is the biggest opportunity of the times.

positioning the pursuit of ecological funds   pursuit of "China to Global"

Q: Today, almost all institutions are emphasizing that they invest in AI, robots, and globalization. As a new organization that has just been established for more than two years, how can we ensure that we can gain a foothold in the market and even continue to lead?

Lei Ming:We are positioned as the Dreamie Ecological Fund, so a relatively large advantage lies in Dreamie’s deep industry accumulation and perfect innovation incubation system-Over the past few years, Dreamie has accumulated systematic capabilities and entrepreneurial methodologies through the successful creation of those mature categories. Based on this system and methodology, we can look for opportunities across industries and regions around the world, especially some opportunities related to robots, and then incubate them accordingly.

The point I want to emphasize here is that I have fully felt thatthe organizational management model and organizational management methodology established by Dreame are ahead of the current era. The outside world may not feel it so strongly, and it may take some time to slowly experience it. We will open these systematic capabilities to our incubated companies.

In factwe have incubated many projects recently - on the one hand, we can invest in the projects incubated by the Dreame ecosystem at the first time with the lowest valuation; on the other hand, compared with external projects, these projects currently have a much higher success rate in our opinion. The growth curves of several projects are based on a model of 300-500 million in revenue in the first year and 1 billion in revenue in the second year. In addition, all projects strive to make the product performance the best in the world from the very beginning, and achieve profitability in the first year without burning money, which is what we emphasize internally as "global high-endization".

Therefore, these projects are very stable and can achieve very fast growth based on the global channels that Dreame has already built, so their growth potential is also quite impressive.

A wireless swimming pool robot product developed by Langsong Future

With the perspective of the entire ecosystem of Dreame, we can also extend our investment to projects other than those incubated by Dreame. For example, we can invest in some upstream projects. At this time, we can consult the business team of Dreame. For example, "whether they will use these upstream technical platforms" is a more accurate and intuitive judgment dimension.

In addition, we can also use Dreame's global perspective to invest in global projects. We have reserved some projects in Silicon Valley, projects in the UK, etc. On the one hand, our fund has a team overseas that can proactively look for projects. On the other hand, the sales team can also recommend projects they see to us.

We are also raising US dollar funds now, but raising US dollars today is different from the past - the logic of fundraising in the past was that US dollar investors were very optimistic about the Chinese economy and basically all in China, and they just gave the money to China's top GPs to let them invest.

Today's external environment may have some changes, so we have been emphasizing the concept of "China to Global" with US dollar LPs, that is, to make good use of China's various capabilities, including supply chain capabilities, engineering R&D capabilities, operational capabilities, etc., to achieve global layout.

Fund income and ecological synergy can be achieved together

Q: As an ecological fund, how do you view the priority of financial returns and ecological synergy?

Lei Ming:From the perspective of the fund, we are definitely guided by financial returns.

Ecological synergy is actually a natural thing. For example, in the process of raising funds for the RMB fund, we have a cooperative relationship with our business team. Because the places suitable for each project may be different, the business team will comprehensively consider factors such as supply chain support, labor costs, and transportation convenience, and select several places that are most suitable for landing. Then we will discuss the establishment of funds with these places suitable for enterprises. If we raise funds first and then force the business team to cooperate with the landing and return investment, this model will not last long. In essence, the two parties are in a win-win relationship. We will also help enterprises to obtain some better investment policies. In general, we decide which incubation project our fund will invest in, at what stage, and at what valuation. The core starting point here is to maximize the return of the fund and make LPs earn money while minimizing risks. At the same time, the business team can also achieve some relatively good results, so this is a natural outcome.

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

Q: In the past two years, you have achieved a good return on investment. In what aspects do you think Zhuichuang has done well? What other areas can be iterated and improved in the future?

Lei Ming: The relatively good results we have achieved in the past two years are largely attributed to the incubation model, entrepreneurial methodology and reusable organizational management incentive system of Dreame. The success rate of these incubation projects is naturally higher, which is obvious.

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

Next, an important direction for our self-iteration is to invest in globalization - we stand from the perspective of a Chinese team and recruit some overseas teams in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries to gradually improve our capabilities in this area and truly achieve "China to Global".