For a newly formed AI startup team, the hardest moment is often not after the product launches, but before it has taken shape: the technical roadmap is in place, the core members have joined, and they may even have identified a market worth pursuing, yet they have neither a mature product nor revenue data. Where will the first round of funding come from? Who would be willing to believe in a group of founders at such an early stage? This first check can often determine whether a technological dream will truly get underway.
On March 17, the first cohort of the Pudong Venture Capital AI Bootcamp officially began, with 24 founders entering the Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Innovation Town. According to public reports, each admitted team signed an agreement with Pudong Venture Capital upon joining and received a guaranteed equity investment of RMB 300,000. Following in-program observations and a graduation assessment, high-quality projects could receive follow-on investments of up to RMB 1.5 million, with the investment mechanism emphasizing that there would be no valuation-adjustment or buyback clauses. By providing funding at a stage when products and revenue have yet to take shape, Pudong is using a concrete mechanism to answer the question most urgent to founders: when a dream is still just a seed, is anyone willing to water it first?
Why “Invest Early, Invest Small, and Invest in Hard Tech”
The AI industry continues to heat up, but the buzz surrounding the sector does not mean that very early-stage teams can easily secure financing. For scientist-led startups, young entrepreneurs, and hard-tech teams, moving technology from the laboratory to the market requires time and capital, as well as a support mechanism capable of accommodating uncertainty. Pudong’s approach is to move its investment window forward and place its bet on the “first mile,” when startups most need support.
“Invest early” means giving investment opportunities to teams at an earlier stage. Around the RMB 2 billion Artificial Intelligence Seed Fund, Pudong Venture Capital has integrated the principles of “selecting, identifying, and investing in people” throughout the bootcamp: the first cohort began in March and graduated in May, while the second took over in July and completed its program in September. The two cohorts attracted more than 350 project applications in total, selected over 40 teams, and every admitted team received an investment intention. A significant proportion had yet to raise financing and had no mature products. Capital is no longer only chasing projects that have already proven themselves; it is also moving closer to founders with technology, ideas, and ideas that are still being validated.
“Invest small” means providing relatively modest early-stage investments that allow continued evaluation, giving technology validation more time. The bootcamp uses RMB 300,000 as its starting level of support, with high-quality projects eligible for follow-on investments of up to RMB 1.5 million after observation and assessment, and it emphasizes that there will be no valuation-adjustment or buyback clauses. For teams still refining their products and seeking their first customers, such an arrangement helps ease early-stage financing pressure, allowing founders to devote more energy to technological breakthroughs, product iteration, and market validation.
“Invest in hard tech” means capital choices must be aligned with industrial priorities and technological innovation. During the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the Pudong New Area announced its Artificial Intelligence Seed Fund, with an initial scale of RMB 500 million, focusing on areas such as vertical-industry models and embodied intelligence. At the same time, Pudong Angel Startup Investment Management Co., Ltd. was established to promote coordination between angel funds of funds and the seed fund, supporting scientists and young teams as they cross the “valley of death” in commercializing their results. As 2026 began, the district government office issued the Work Plan for Advancing the Construction of the Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Innovation Town in the Pudong New Area, further calling for the seed fund to “invest early and invest small,” to leverage the role of the district’s leading industrial funds, and to strengthen guarantees for computing power, models, data corpora, and other essential resources. Capital support and industrial infrastructure have been placed on the same task list, responding to founders’ continuing need to move from being able to “get started” to being able to “make it happen.”
Validating the Mechanism: Investment on Admission and Ecosystem Support
For early-stage teams, a single investment is important, but it cannot replace every form of support along the entrepreneurial journey. A truly valuable mechanism ensures that funding, experience, and industrial resources arrive at critical moments in a team’s development. The Pudong Venture Capital AI Bootcamp is therefore not merely a financing channel: it also includes modules on clarifying direction, understanding capital, strengthening core capabilities, and practical training. Industry mentors are invited to participate in instruction, helping founders calibrate their direction, fill gaps in their business capabilities, and gain a clearer understanding of how technology can move toward products and markets.
Graduation is not the end of support either. At the bootcamp’s Demo Day, more than 100 representatives from investment institutions and industry chains engaged directly with founders, and a channel was opened for potential follow-on investments. In-program observations were combined with expert reviews, giving projects an opportunity to receive continued attention as they were further evaluated. At the same time, the bootcamp was linked with competitions and incubators to foster a mutually reinforcing development loop of “competitions, bootcamps, investment, and incubation.” Public reports noted that, through full-spectrum incubation and coordination with the Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Innovation Town, more than a dozen high-quality projects had settled in Pudong, most of them as new arrivals. The launch of global recruitment for the third cohort also means that Pudong is not merely waiting for projects to mature before they relocate there; it is actively reaching out to global talent and sources of innovation to bring more entrepreneurial seeds into its support system.
Space and Costs: Why Hard-Tech Teams Stay in Pudong
Technology entrepreneurship requires not only a financing plan, but also careful calculations of time, space, and the cost of trial and error.For teams still in the validation stage, office costs, computing costs, model calls, access to corpora, and government administrative procedures—any one of them can become a practical burden on the road ahead. At Zhangjiang AI Town, Pudong Venture Capital has responded to the practical needs of startup teams by proposing to strengthen guarantees for key factors such as computing power, models, and corpora, while linking these with low-rent space, government services, and various forms of voucher support, in an effort to reduce the overall costs of starting a business and validating technology.
Carriers such as the Moli Community and the National-Local Co-Built Humanoid Robot Innovation Center connect pilot-testing conditions, application scenarios, and developer communities within the same industrial area. For entrepreneurs, what matters is not merely having an office, but whether they can more easily find technical partners, connect with industry demand, and validate product capabilities. When capital support, industrial resources, and innovation space work together, choosing to stay in Zhangjiang means more than choosing an office location—it also means choosing a growth path that makes it easier to connect with upstream and downstream partners and sustain continuous iteration.
For AI entrepreneurs, Pudong Venture Capital is attractive precisely because it brings three key questions to the fore: Is it willing to invest in the earliest-stage teams? Can it support critical validation with small amounts of funding? Is it willing to accompany hard-tech companies through the long journey from technology to industry? Through the coordinated efforts of seed funds, training camps, and the innovation town’s supporting ecosystem, entrepreneurs are no longer faced with an isolated sum of funding, but with an early-stage innovation support system that is gradually taking shape. The launch of technological dreams therefore receives an additional boost from the city.
The final answer is still being written
From the opening of the first cohort in March to the completion of the incubation cycle for two training camps, Pudong has continued to make moves in investment and entrepreneurial services at the earliest stages of AI. But the true value of a system ultimately depends not on how lively a roadshow is, nor merely on how many projects are signed, but on how many teams will be able to make the critical leap here from technology validation to product formation, and from products into industry, three or five years from now.
The opening move has been made in the most difficult “first mile” of entrepreneurship. Going forward, sustained funding support, solid industrial services, and transparent performance evaluation will jointly determine how many truly competitive hard-tech enterprises this fertile land can nurture. For AI entrepreneurs seeking a starting point, Pudong Venture Capital is offering not only an investment invitation, but also a long-term invitation to move forward shoulder to shoulder with innovators.
