Qiming Venture Partners, a prominent China-focussed VC firm whose portfolio includes TikTok owner ByteDance, has expanded into public stock market investments for the first time, with a recently launched $500 million fund that bets primarily on Chinese healthcare companies listed outside mainland China, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Qiming’s previously unreported move is part of an emerging trend among top Chinese VC and private equity firms to set up separate entities that invest in publicly traded stocks. For example, Sequoia Capital China, the Silicon Valley VC giant’s Chinese affiliate led by influential dealmaker Neil Shen, last year launched a separate hedge fund arm. Sequoia China Equity Partners, which mainly invests in overseas-listed Chinese firms, is headed by Fang Cao, who previously was a managing director at private equity firm Trustbridge.
