Origin Fund

Founding Partner Zhu Yin leads the investment committee, supported by a core partnership group. The firm operates with a flat decision-making structure typical of sub-$200 million Chinese venture managers — deals are debated across the entire investment team rather than siloed by sector, and final approval requires Zhu's sign-off alongside at least one other partner.

The firm sources primarily through founder networks built during Zhu Yin's tenure in China's internet sector, supplemented by relationships with university labs and accelerator programs in Beijing and Shanghai. Because Origin Fund writes sub-$1 million checks at stages most multi-billion-dollar platforms cannot economically serve, repeat founders and angel investors route the firm into pre-institutional rounds that would otherwise close on friends-and-family terms.

Origin Fund has raised exclusively renminbi-denominated vehicles to date. The firm has not announced a parallel US-dollar fund structure or offshore vehicle, which means it deploys domestic capital under local regulatory frameworks and faces different exit-path considerations than the dollar-fund peers that dominate China's venture capital headlines.

The firm concentrates on seed and Pre-A rounds, typically as the first or second institutional check into a company. It will occasionally participate in Series A rounds when a portfolio company raises follow-on financing, but the partnership does not pursue the growth-stage and pre-IPO deals that require larger reserve allocations.

Origin Fund operates as a compact, locally registered private equity manager, not as a multi-product platform. Unlike Sequoia China or Matrix Partners China, which run vehicles spanning seed to pre-IPO across multiple currencies and strategies, Origin Fund deploys a single strategy from a single fund family. That focus limits its ability to write large follow-on checks but eliminates the internal competition for deals that occurs inside multi-strategy platforms.

The firm has not publicly drawn sector exclusions, but its portfolio concentration in enterprise software, AI, digital health, and fintech implies a posture of avoiding capital-intensive hardware, semiconductor fabrication, and consumer internet plays that require heavy user-acquisition spend. Origin Fund also shows no record of investing in the edtech or property-tech sectors that attracted heavy Chinese venture investment before regulatory shifts in 2021.

No public record indicates that Origin Fund maintains a philanthropic foundation or impact-investing vehicle separate from its core venture funds. The firm's disclosed activities remain confined to for-profit early-stage investing, and its principals have not announced personal or institutional philanthropic vehicles.