Top Venture Capital Firms in China, Japan and South Korea (2026): HongShan, Hillhouse, Global Brain and the State Funds

The top venture capital firms in China, Japan and South Korea share one feature that distinguishes them from their American and European peers: in all three countries the government is the largest limited partner, and its priorities (semiconductors, AI, robotics, biotech, regional development) set the sector mix. This guide, part of the Kurums Venture Capital hub, profiles the private firms that lead each market, explains the state vehicles behind them (China’s guidance funds, Japan’s JIC and METI programmes, Korea’s Fund of Funds), covers the 2025–2026 developments that matter (the US outbound-investment regime, Hong Kong’s IPO revival, Korea’s record year, Japan’s slow unicorn pipeline) and tells founders, CFOs and LPs how to engage with each market as of October 2026.

Which Chinese venture capital firms lead in 2026?

HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Hillhouse and its venture arm GL Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, IDG Capital, 5Y Capital (formerly Morningside), Source Code Capital, ZhenFund, Legend Capital, Matrix Partners China (now MPCi), Gaorong, Shunwei, Sinovation and Lanchi Ventures (ex-BlueRun China) are the leading private managers, operating alongside state guidance funds that now dominate the LP base.

HongShan is the reference firm. After separating from Sequoia in 2023 it kept the China, Hong Kong and Singapore businesses and, according to the Financial Times via The Bridge Club, closed an RMB fund of about $2.5 billion in March 2025, the largest raised by a privately owned Chinese VC that year, with the Hangzhou city government and a group of state-owned and private insurers as LPs; that compares with a $9 billion raise in 2022. The firm reported AUM above $61 billion as of April 2026, 1,700-plus portfolio companies, more than 180 IPOs and 140-plus unicorns, and its recent investments include the AI model companies Zhipu and Moonshot. Hillhouse, Zhang Lei’s Singapore-headquartered manager, runs roughly $100 billion across private equity, growth, public equities and the GL Ventures early-stage platform. Qiming Venture Partners, Shanghai-based with $9.5 billion raised across eleven USD and seven RMB funds, is the leading healthcare and technology specialist with 580-plus companies and 70-plus IPOs.

IDG Capital (about $20 billion, 1,400-plus investments, Baidu, Tencent and Xiaomi in its history) and Legend Capital (over $10 billion of commitments, 129 IPOs) are the other scale players. 5Y Capital (about $5 billion), Source Code Capital (ByteDance, Meituan ecosystem), ZhenFund (angel and seed, co-founded by Xu Xiaoping), Gaorong Capital, Shunwei (Lei Jun’s firm, over $3 billion) and Sinovation Ventures (Kai-Fu Lee, AI focus) form the early-stage tier. The most interesting 2026 data point is who is still raising: Murph Capital’s Q2 2026 tracker lists BAI Capital’s $600 million first close of an $800 million fund for Chinese companies going global, Luminous Ventures’ $733 million dual-currency fund for deep tech and robotics, and Lanchi Ventures’ roughly $560 million Fund IV for frontier technology and AI. Altss ranks Asia’s largest managers but notes that no authoritative league table of Asia-headquartered venture AUM exists, so figures mix USD and RMB vehicles and dates.

How do China’s government guidance funds and the RMB-versus-USD split shape the market?

Government guidance funds are now the dominant LPs: in December 2025 Beijing launched a national venture capital guidance fund with 100 billion yuan (about $14 billion) of central capital and a target of mobilising 1 trillion yuan over a 20-year life, prioritising seed and early-stage hard-tech companies valued under 500 million yuan with investments capped at 50 million yuan each.

Caixin’s reporting on the launch describes a three-tier structure that channels most of the money through sub-funds run by private and state managers, concentrated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Greater Bay Area, and targeting semiconductors, biotechnology and other strategic emerging industries with long development cycles. This sits on top of thousands of provincial and municipal guidance funds created since 2015 that collectively hold several trillion yuan of committed capital. The practical effect is that a Chinese VC raising an RMB fund in 2026 must usually accept a local-government LP with a “return investment” requirement (a multiple of the commitment invested in companies registered in that city or province), which is why HongShan’s 2025 fund was anchored by Hangzhou and why so many Chinese AI and robotics startups register subsidiaries in Hefei, Suzhou or Shenzhen.

The USD side has contracted sharply. The US Treasury’s outbound investment security programme, in force since 2 January 2025, prohibits or requires notification of US-person investments in Chinese companies working on advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and certain AI systems, and US pension funds and university endowments have largely stopped committing to China-focused USD vehicles. The CSRC’s overseas-listing filing regime, introduced in 2023, added a review step for Hong Kong and US IPOs, with VIE structures facing particular scrutiny according to Chambers’ 2026 China practice guide. The result, as Chambers notes, is that redemption rights now appear in about 90% of Chinese PE and VC transactions and two thirds impose joint personal liability on founders, a term unheard of in the US venture market. Founders raising in China should read our explainer on reading a term sheet before it reads you with those clauses in mind.

Hong Kong’s revival is the counter-trend. HKEX ranked first globally by IPO proceeds in 2025 for the first time since 2019, raising about $36 billion across 106 listings, up more than 200% year on year, led by CATL’s $5.2 billion A+H listing in May 2025, Pony AI and Mixue, with eight IPOs above HK$10 billion and 316 active applications in the pipeline by December 2025. DealStreetAsia’s Dealogic-based data showed Greater China startup financing at about $13.1 billion in Q4 2025, the highest quarter of the year and the third consecutive quarterly rise, with the most megadeals in three years. For Chinese VCs the message is that exits have moved to Hong Kong and the STAR Market, and the AI model companies (Zhipu, Moonshot, MiniMax, DeepSeek’s ecosystem) and humanoid-robotics firms (Unitree, AgiBot) are the 2026 pipeline.

Which Japanese venture capital firms matter, and why is the market still small?

JAFCO (the oldest and historically largest independent), Globis Capital Partners (¥72.7 billion Fund VII, 2023), Global Brain ($2.3–2.7 billion AUM with multiple corporate funds), Incubate Fund, Coral Capital (¥25 billion Fund IV, 2024), DNX Ventures, UTEC (UTEC6 about $326 million), ANRI, WiL, Beyond Next Ventures (¥25.7 billion Fund III), SBI Investment (¥100 billion Digital Space Fund, 2025) and the corporate venture arms of ITOCHU, MUFG and LY Corporation lead a market that remains a fraction of Korea’s or India’s despite Japan’s economic size.

Japan’s venture market is dominated by corporate and financial-group capital. Global Brain is the model: an independent manager that also runs dedicated CVC funds for KDDI, Sony Financial, JGC and other corporates, with over 1,300 deals and 43 IPOs on its record and Fund VIII targeting ¥40 billion when launched in 2021. Globis Capital Partners, attached to the Globis business school, raised ¥72.7 billion for Fund VII in 2023 and leads Series A and B rounds in software and digital platforms (Mercari, SmartHR, Spiber). JAFCO, founded in 1973 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, invests from seed to growth in technology and healthcare across Japan and selected Asian markets. SBI Investment, part of the SBI financial group, completed a ¥100 billion Digital Space Fund in 2025 and has cumulative commitments above ¥800 billion, making it the largest domestic pool by volume.

The independent early-stage firms are smaller but influential. Coral Capital (formerly 500 Startups Japan) closed ¥25 billion for Coral IV in May 2024 and is the most founder-visible seed investor in Tokyo. Incubate Fund runs the Incubate Camp programme and leads seed rounds; ANRI focuses on internet and deep tech with a dedicated ANRI-GREEN climate vehicle; DNX Ventures bridges Tokyo and Silicon Valley for B2B SaaS; UTEC, spun out of the University of Tokyo, has over $1 billion AUM and leads university spin-outs in life sciences, robotics and climate; Beyond Next Ventures raised ¥25.7 billion for a 2024 life-science fund. ITOCHU Technology Ventures closed a ¥16.1 billion Fund VI in March 2025. At the top sits SoftBank: the Vision Funds manage $100 billion-plus, are run from London and Tokyo and, in 2025–2026, have concentrated on OpenAI, where SoftBank’s gains have transformed the group’s results. Why Japan still produces so few venture-backed giants, despite all this capital, is the subject of our analysis of why Japan has so few unicorns: early IPOs on the TSE Growth market at small valuations, a thin Series B and C layer, and corporate LPs whose goals are strategic rather than financial.

Which South Korean venture firms lead, and how does the Fund of Funds work?

Korea Investment Partners, SBVA (formerly SoftBank Ventures Asia), KB Investment, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Atinum ($624 million flagship, 2024), DSC Investment, LB Investment, Stonebridge, SV Investment, Company K, Altos Ventures (US-based but Korea’s most successful early investor), Hashed (crypto and web3) and Kakao Ventures lead a market built on the Korea Venture Investment Corporation’s Fund of Funds, which has a KRW 1.6 trillion (about $1.2 billion) budget for 2026.

Korea’s 2025 numbers, published by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and reported by Wowtale in February 2026, were the second-best on record after 2021: KRW 13.6 trillion ($9.6 billion) invested, up 14%, across an all-time high of 8,542 deals, with ICT services (20.8%), bio and healthcare (17.4%) and electrical machinery (14.6%) the largest sectors and gaming the fastest-growing. New fund formation reached KRW 14.3 trillion ($10.1 billion), up 34.1%, with private capital providing about 80%; commitments from pension funds and mutual-aid associations rose 165% and from corporations 61.5%. The country counted 27 unicorns after adding Rebellions and FuriosaAI (AI chips), BeNow and Galaxy Corporation in 2025, and Mirae Asset Venture led Rebellions’ $400 million pre-IPO round in 2026.

The Fund of Funds is the engine. Managed by KVIC, it commits government money as an anchor LP to private VC funds that must raise matching private capital. The 2026 programme, per KoreaTechDesk, is KRW 1.6 trillion (up from KRW 1.3 trillion in 2025) and is expected to mobilise KRW 3.6 trillion of total venture capital, with KRW 550 billion for a “Next-Generation Unicorn” AI and deep-tech programme, KRW 390 billion for early-stage and youth entrepreneurship, KRW 340 billion for private-sector collaboration, KRW 230 billion for regional innovation (with a 20% regional mandate on all general programmes) and KRW 120 billion for M&A and secondaries. KVIC’s Global Fund programme separately commits to foreign VCs that agree to invest in Korean startups: the H2 2025 round was KRW 768 billion (about $560 million) and the programme has mobilised KRW 12.3 trillion across 74 funds since 2013. SBVA, which rebranded from SoftBank Ventures Asia after being acquired by The Edgeof in 2023, closed a $150 million AI fund and invested KRW 126.7 billion in 2025 with a 2026 focus on AI and deep tech. DSC Investment formed Korea’s largest secondary fund in 2024, a sign that the market is maturing toward liquidity.

How do the leading firms in China, Japan and Korea compare?

Sources: Altss Asia ranking (HongShan AUM dated April 2026), The Bridge Club/FT, Caixin (Dec 2025), Peony Japan Series A investors 2025, Wowtale (Feb 2026), KoreaTechDesk, Ellty Seoul investors, Murph Capital Q2 2026. Scale figures mix AUM, capital raised and single-fund sizes.

How do geopolitics and US outbound investment rules affect these markets?

Directly for China and indirectly for Japan and Korea. The US outbound investment programme (effective 2 January 2025) bars US persons from certain Chinese semiconductor, quantum and AI investments, which has pushed Chinese firms toward RMB capital, while Japan and Korea have become the preferred Asian destinations for US and European LPs seeking exposure without China risk.

For LPs the practical consequence is a re-rating of Japan and Korea. KVIC’s Global Fund programme has drawn US and European managers to Seoul with matching commitments; Korea’s wealth fund has said it will increase bets on AI startups; and Japan’s government has set a target of creating 100 unicorns and 100,000 startups by 2027 through JIC, METI and the Japan Startup Investment programmes, which is why a16z, Sequoia, Lightspeed and General Catalyst have all increased Tokyo activity. We discuss the LP mechanics in our guide to investing in venture capital funds as a limited partner. For Chinese firms, the strategy has been to split: HongShan, Hillhouse and Qiming now run Singapore or Hong Kong entities for non-China deals, and a cohort of funds (BAI Capital is one) explicitly back Chinese founders building for overseas markets, from Southeast Asia to the Gulf. The spillover into the India and Southeast Asia venture markets is visible in the supply-chain relocation story in Vietnam.

How should founders and LPs approach venture firms in China, Japan and Korea?

In China, foreign founders are rare and domestic founders raise RMB from local-government-anchored funds; in Japan, apply directly to Coral, Incubate Camp, ANRI and the corporate accelerators; in Korea, use TIPS (the government’s matching programme) and KVIC-backed funds, which must deploy a share of capital into Korean startups. LPs access all three markets mainly through the global platforms, Korean Global Fund GPs or Japan-focused managers with corporate co-investors.

Japan’s on-ramps are unusually open. Coral Capital runs rolling applications and publishes its investment thesis; Incubate Fund’s Incubate Camp is a structured programme that pairs founders with partners before investing; D2 Startup Factory (the DeNA-linked programme) and the corporate accelerators of KDDI, Sony and Toyota take direct applications. Korea’s TIPS programme, administered by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, matches private seed investment from accredited operators with government grants and is the standard first step for a Korean deep-tech startup; most leading Korean VCs are TIPS operators. We list the application channels in our guide to VC firms and programmes accepting applications in Asia and the Middle East. China is different: the practical route for a domestic founder is a provincial guidance-fund sub-fund or an angel such as ZhenFund, and for a foreign founder the realistic path is Hong Kong or Singapore incorporation with HongShan’s or Hillhouse’s offshore teams.

For a comparison of how these state-anchored systems differ from Europe’s EIF-anchored model, read our guide to the top venture capital firms in the UK and Europe; the structural resemblance between Korea’s Fund of Funds and the EIF is striking, and so is the difference in outcomes. Browse the full VC Firms by Country pillar for the other regional profiles, and see our analysis of where venture capital went in 2024–2026 for how AI chips, robotics and biotech money is flowing into these three markets.

Frequently Asked Questions