Five years ago, she held a heavy position in the Longxin.

Author: Liu Bo

A milestone moment.

On the night of July 23, Changxin Technology (688825.SH) announced that the company will list on the STAR Market on July 27. The IPO offering price will be 8.66 yuan per share, with an intended fundraising amount of about 58 billion yuan—meaning the largest IPO in STAR Market history is about to ring the bell.

What outsiders may not know is that, within the narrative of China’s memory resurgence, there is the presence of a female investor—Dr. Peng Guie (Polly), Managing Partner at Huaḍen High-Tech. Five years ago, it was she who, under pressure, made what turned out to be the largest single bet of nearly 900 million yuan, increasing her position in Changxin Technology despite the headwinds.

Not long ago, the investment community met Dr. Peng in Beijing while she was there on business trip. Rarely appearing in public view, this was the first time she patiently told those stories from the past about Changxin.

Five years ago, one day across four cities

When discussing Changxin, Dr. Peng first thought of that “one day across four cities” five years ago.

It was the end of August 2021. At that time, Huaden was holding an internal monthly meeting near West Lake in Hangzhou. During the meeting, the team struggled to reach a consensus on the investment topic concerning Changxin. The discussion ran very late that day, and the Changxin project team had been talking for a long time—because the DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) track was too difficult, the risks too high, and the cycle too long. Most institutions bypassed it, and there were also disagreements within Huaden.

The team’s concerns were specific: at that time, both the industrial and capital cycles were in decline, and during the pandemic the investment market’s confidence was low. The STAR Market boom had cooled.

The meeting room fell silent for a long time. Until one of the partners spoke a line—calm in tone, like stating a fact that did not need to be proven: “This project must be invested in. Even though it’s full of difficulties, I personally will invest 15 million yuan. This team is too excellent.”

No applause—only silence. Later Dr. Peng explained: when an industry is so hard that financial models can’t quantify it, the founder’s judgment becomes the biggest model. “Precisely because we’ve seen too many memory project failures, so we know in this track, people matter more than numbers.”

After the meeting ended deep into the night. In the early hours of the next day, when dawn was just breaking, she caught the earliest flight and left.

That day, Dr. Peng ran across four cities. First, she flew to Beijing before dawn to accompany the Changxin team for an institutional roadshow.

On the plane, thick data tables were still in front of her.

After the roadshow ended, she immediately rushed to Daxing Airport, then took a flight an hour later to Hefei. She arrived in Hefei in the afternoon and went straight to the frontline workshop of the Changxin factory. The lights in the workshop were very bright, and the air-conditioned environment carried a slight chill. Changxin founder Zhu Yiming, wearing a cleanroom suit, pointed through the glass at the equipment in the cleanroom, walking and talking as he explained technical progress. She followed behind, listening while thinking about a practical question: how much money would this production line need in order to keep running?

That evening, she ate boxed meals in the factory meeting room: braised pork with red sauce, plus a few side dishes. Everyone ate and chatted—how to lock in capacity, how to move forward with financing, and how to make this path work step by step.

In the deep night, Dr. Peng took the last high-speed train back to Shanghai, arriving home in the early morning. In her phone memo, one line was written: “Hangzhou → Beijing → Hefei → Shanghai. Worth it.”

In subsequent investment decision meetings, the Huaden team discussed Changxin repeatedly. What outsiders rarely knew was that the pressure they faced then was even greater than people imagined. As a VC firm, Huaden focuses more on early-stage investments, where a single investment size is usually several tens of millions of yuan; but what Changxin needed was close to the scale of a fund.

On this, Dr. Peng didn’t spend too much time on financial models. She emphasized again and again: “This thing always needs someone to do it. Everyone is waiting—so who’s going to do it?” In the end, she pushed through the majority and decided to invest nearly 900 million yuan in Changxin.

And that is how Huaden made what became the largest investment in China’s Huaden history.

Such a scale also meant fundraising would not be easy. For this, Dr. Peng, together with her team, patiently and tirelessly talked one-on-one with LPs, just to convey a consensus—investing in Changxin is supporting the country, and supporting the development of domestic semiconductor industry. It was the long-term backing and firm trust from the LPs behind her that gave Huaden the confidence to take a heavy position.

Ten years ago, from Zhaoyi Innovation to Changxin Technology

Changxin was founded in Hefei in 2016. Huaden did not miss any of the project’s approval meetings or due diligence meetings. The Hefei industrial investment partner leading the project was Huaden’s strategic cooperation partner for many years.

But this relationship can be traced even further back.

In 2005, Zhu Yiming returned to China to found Zhaoyi Innovation, and Huaden stood behind him. After the company went public in 2016, Huaden didn’t stop. It turned to do even harder work—attempting to open up the DRAM market—leading to the story of Changxin Technology.

As an investor who has focused on the semiconductor industry for years, Dr. Peng knew how difficult it was: high barriers, large investment, long cycles. The industrial characteristics of semiconductors were reflected fully in the DRAM track.

“Back then, China’s DRAM was not yet trusted by many. Even IBM’s Fab (wafer foundry) failed, and Germany and Japan’s efforts at the national level still couldn’t make memory succeed. So almost all mainstream institutions bypassed it back then,” Dr. Peng recalled.

After the ZTE incident in mid-2018, she became even more certain about one thing: China’s semiconductor industry needs its own industrial chain. Even more crucially, this would be led by Zhu Yiming—“so companies in key tracks and key nodes can’t be missed.”

Dr. Peng had known Zhu Yiming for a long time. She knew he wasn’t the kind of person who would “try and if it doesn’t work, pull out.” She saw that focus clearly: “In the past, some companies after listing would either move into real estate or pivot into finance. But Zhu Yiming still has deep involvement in the memory track. That impressed us.”

What moved the Huaden team the most was the truly big dream in Zhu Yiming’s heart. He never set limits for himself or the company. He not only dared to imagine, but also dared to do. In other words, he is an entrepreneur unafraid of “big matters.”

China’s semiconductor industry lacks not money, but people willing to spend ten years grinding out an industrial chain. In Dr. Peng’s view, the essence of investing is precisely to connect founders’ dreams. Founders’ focus and perseverance are the resolve behind her decision to act.

Changxin Technology lived up to expectations as well. In only a few years, it walked the path that overseas giants took decades—even decades—to complete. With an upcoming epic IPO, the Huaden team was filled with emotion. Five years of counter-cyclical heavy investment still vividly stood out. Dr. Peng felt even more strongly: Huaden’s investees are almost all long-cycle projects, meaning the team has to sit on this cold bench for as long as 10 or even 15 years.

Yet she always emphasized to the team that effort would never be let down. “For institutions that still run on the front line of hard-tech investing starting from Silicon Valley, there are very few left—only Huaden has kept its commitment. Because we believe that if we persist, we’ll be able to see the light.”

Those who keep their stance will eventually receive time’s gifts

This is a snapshot of Dr. Peng’s investment career.

Looking back to when she first joined Huaden in 2015, the team’s first impression of her was that she was an “engineer-style investor”—not the elite swagger of Wall Street. But the team’s accurate judgment of how China’s semiconductor industry would change impressed her.

After joining Huaden, her first investment was in brain-computer interface—back then, the track itself could hardly be considered a track. She invested $3 million in Qiangnao Technology. At that time, the company had not yet left the lab, and what moved her was Qiangnao Technology founder Han Bicheng’s original intention—“technology for good.”

After that, she made investments one after another: Yitang Co., Ltd., Chipright Semiconductor, Yuexin Semiconductor..... As Changxin was about to list on the STAR Market, this female partner who had placed what became Huaden China’s largest single bet proved herself with each hard-core investment.

Having walked alongside Huaden for a decade, Dr. Peng personally witnessed how these super projects went from “no one believed it” to “everyone knows it.” She also gradually realized something—Huaden isn’t just investing; it is standing by the enterprise when it most needs a companion. This is truly a two-way journey. It is exactly this resonance with enterprises that forms the core of why Huaden never misses super projects.

“I often stress within Huaden—if the founder doesn’t give up, we won’t either.” She describes Huaden as a “slow fund”: when market enthusiasm comes, it doesn’t chase the trend; during industry downturns, it insists on taking a counter-cyclical heavy position; it doesn’t pursue short-term hotspot bubbles. Instead, it settles its mind and stays with enterprises through the cycle. This steadiness is the most precious underlying color that Huaden inherited.

As outsiders can see, in the long list of shareholders behind Changxin, the presence of market-oriented VC/PE funds is rare. Huaden is precisely one of the few that has stayed with the heavy position. Looking back at the time when Changxin urgently needed help in the snow, the reason why Dr. Peng and Huaden didn’t hesitate was not because she was smarter than others, but because she knew that when the direction was right and the people were right, what remained was to wait for time to verify.

“Perhaps pessimists are right, but optimists always get returns.” Just like that night five years ago, she firmly chose optimism.

Over more than thirty years of China’s venture capital and entrepreneurship investing, tides come and go. As time flows forward like a winding river, some people plunge in, while others quietly step away. At the end of exchanges with the investment community, when asked, “After investing for so many years, what do you trust the most?” Dr. Peng thought for a moment and answered: “Investment is believing in time.”

She remembered a senior once said: “The true essence of investing is simple—choose firmly to walk alongside like-minded people. Time is the best friend, and it will bring the most beautiful gifts.” She has kept that line in her heart to this day.