Chinese early stage venture investment firm Morningside Venture Capital has completed fundraising for its first RMB-denominated fund at its RMB1 billion (US$140 million) hard cap.
A number of Chinese well-known investment institutions, fund of funds and Internet companies including China Merchants Ventures, national industrial guidance fund Zhongjin Qiyuan, Tencent Holdings Ltd, Xiaomi Inc, have invested in the fund, according to a company announcement.
Similar to the company's previous U.S. dollars fund, the new fund will focus on Chinese early-stage companies in the sectors of entertainment, online media, artificial intelligence, business services, financial services, healthcare, sports, social media, smart hardware, education and transport.
"We have thought about raising a RMB fund for a long time until we found that there are a lot of mature early-stage fund limit partners in the Chinese market, so we decided to raise our first RMB fund. We believe it will bring us a lot of opportunities,” said Ken Shi, a partner and managing director at Morningside.
Founded in 1992, the firm currently has US$1.7 billion asset under management via four U.S. dollar funds and one RMB fund. In 2015, it completed its fourth China TMT (technology, media and telecom) fund at US$660 million.
Its Morningside China TMT Fund III Co-Investment and Morningside China TMT Fund II closed with US$308 million and US$200 million in commitments, respectively.
Some recent investments made by Morningside include leading a US$10 million series A round in Chinese Biotech Start-Up TransThera Biosciences, and a US$32 million series C round in workout app KEEP. Other portfolio include travel services platform Ctrip, ride sharing company Didi Chuxing, smart phone developer Xiaomi, and app maker Yixia.com.