China’s AI startup Manycore Tech Inc. is keen to grow its global presence, despite tensions between Washington and Beijing presenting increasing challenges for Chinese companies to build cutting-edge technologies and market them abroad.
The Hangzhou-based spatial design software supplier, a potential challenger to US-based Autodesk Inc., now has local teams in more than 10 countries including the US, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia to serve enterprise customers.
“All the countries need our product but we should pick some countries to run, to focus on,” Manycore co-founder and Chairman Victor Huang told Bloomberg TV in an interview on March 19. “Our global business is also growing very fast, especially for the freemium model. So I think it has great potential for globalisation.”
The 40-year-old Mr Huang joined a group of young Chinese AI entrepreneurs including Manus AI’s Mr Xiao Hong in expressing global ambitions at a time when China-based companies are attracting more scrutiny in the West, with DeepSeek banned from government devices in several countries.
To elevate its game, Manycore is recruiting students from top US universities including Stanford and Harvard as well as from China’s leading Peking University and Tsinghua University, according to Mr Huang. Mr Huang himself has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and previously worked for Nvidia Corp. in the US. He got his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Zhejiang University, which is also the alma mater of DeekSeek founder Liang Wenfeng.
The Chinese software provider now offers two products globally – Coohom and SpatialVerse, Mr Huang said. As of 2024, Manycore amassed an average of 86.3 million monthly active visitors with customers across more than 200 markets, according to the company’s initial public offering prospectus.
Mr Huang’s company is known domestically as one of Hangzhou’s Six Little Dragons, a cohort of prominent hardtech startups including DeepSeek and Unitree Robotics that started out in the southern Chinese city, also home to China’s e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding Co.
Manycore is set to become the first among the six to go public – it filed for IPO in Hong Kong in February. It scrapped an earlier plan to list in the US after ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc.’s ill-fated New York debut.
While a lack of access to Nvidia’s most cutting-edge AI semiconductors has become a common challenge for Chinese tech firms, Mr Huang is unfazed. Manycore is devoting engineering sources to optimise all the computing power the company can get legally, including renting from the likes of Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, he said.
“We don’t need the high-end GPU right now, because our strategy is to make the rendering and AI cheaper with lower price for our users and make it faster,” Mr Huang said, adding his company relies on semiconductors from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. “Our legal teams are going to make sure all our purchases are legal, then we build our own software and system based on the legal hardware.”
Mr Huang also put an emphasis on making his products affordable for potential clients, an approach that is not dissimilar to the longtime practice by Chinese firms in a wide range of industries including electric vehicles to adopt cutthroat pricing and sacrifice profitability in exchange for market share. Manycore lost 422.1 million yuan (S$77.7 million) in the first nine months of 2024, extending at least two years of losses.
“When I start our company, we want all the people who need our product, they can afford our product, so we want to make something cheap enough for all the users. We want to get as much users as possible. That is our strategy,” he said. BLOOMBERG
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