Six IPOs and a $6.7 Billion Unicorn: Inside Renmin University's VC Dynasty

Liu Qiangdong, a Renmin University of China alumnus and founder of JD.com, now controls six listed companies after JD Industrial's December 2025 debut in Hong Kong capped a two-decade string of IPOs. The listing closed out a run that began with JD Group's Nasdaq debut in 2014 and turned Liu into the most quantifiable representative of what Chinese market watchers call the "RUC Faction" — an alumni network whose footprint across the country's venture capital and IPO landscape keeps expanding.

JD Industrial itself was long considered JD's "most hidden unicorn." The company started as part of JD's enterprise business, became an independent business unit in July 2017, and launched as a first-level JD category with a JD Mall homepage entry in 2018. JD Group announced its industrial products strategy in March 2019 as demand for professional procurement and industrial digitalization accelerated.

The financing trail shows how much institutional capital backed the business before listing. In 2020, JD Industrial closed a $230 million Series A led by GGV Capital, with HSG and CPE participating. In 2021, it raised $105 million in Series A-1 preferred stock financing that included Domking and GGV Capital. In 2023, it completed a $300 million Series B at a $6.7 billion valuation, jointly led by Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala and Abu Dhabi investment fund 42XFund, with asset manager M&G, BPEA EQT — the Asian platform of EQT — and returning shareholder HSG joining the round.

Liu's broader listing record explains the attention. JD Group completed a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2020. That same month, Dada Group landed on Nasdaq, with JD as its largest shareholder and an IPO cornerstone investor; in June 2025, Dada completed its privatization and was fully absorbed into the JD system. In December 2020, JD Health listed in Hong Kong. JD Logistics followed with its own Hong Kong IPO in May 2021. Liu then acquired the listed logistics company Deppon. He also holds two unicorns yet to ring the bell: JD Smart Industry Development, which filed for a Hong Kong listing in January this year before its application materials expired, and JD Technology, which filed for a Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Board listing in 2020, withdrew in 2021, and has seen repeated but unconfirmed market speculation about a Hong Kong move.

The All-Star Team Behind the Founders

If Liu Qiangdong represents the operating side of the RUC network, Zhang Lei represents the capital side. Zhang entered RUC's Department of Finance and Banking in 1990 and founded GL Ventures in 2005. Over twenty years, his firm has invested in Tencent, JD.com, ByteDance, Meituan and Liby, making him one of the most recognized top-tier investors in China's primary market.

Zhang has also directed resources back to the school. In 2017, he donated 300 million yuan to fund the GL Ventures School of Artificial Intelligence at RUC. On September 16 this year, the school and GL Ventures co-hosted the 2nd "AI Future Exploration Day" technical salon. Fang Jingyi, Executive Director of GL Ventures, told the event that the technology wave keeps reshaping the industry's talent structure, and urged students to enter the market during the window before the industrial structure solidifies. "Entering the market during the window period when the industrial structure has not yet been solidified can achieve faster growth and obtain higher-quality industrial resources," she said, encouraging students to seize technology implementation opportunities and stay focused on the science and innovation track.

Qiu Guogen, founder of Chongyang Investment, anchors the local private equity and securities investment line of the network. The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at RUC, established on January 19, 2013, operates on the education fund Chongyang donated to the university. According to the case included in the "2024 Observation Report on Large Donations of Chinese University Foundations," Qiu not only invested 200 million yuan but provided free asset preservation and appreciation consulting. By the end of 2021, the fund had accumulated 534 million yuan in contributions — the principal was never consumed and instead doubled, making it a model of endowment operation with perpetual principal retention.

Around these figures sits a wider bench of RUC alumni in the capital markets: Xiao Bing, Executive Partner of Dachen Venture Capital; Li Hui, Founding Partner of Dazheng Capital; Liu Lefe, Chairman of CPE Yuanfeng; Yang Ge, Chairman and Partner of Kunyu Capital; Chen Wenjiang, Founding Partner of YI Capital; and Xiao Jiancong, Founder of Longmashan Venture Capital.

This network reinforces itself. Alumni investors find it easier to build trust with founders who went to the same school, and when RUC-founded companies reach the IPO stage, familiar alumni names often appear among cornerstone investors and sponsors. The dynamic — investors know entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs know investors — reduces information asymmetry and shortens the distance from an idea to the listing bell.

The University Itself Has Become an LP

RUC is not just a talent source; it participates directly in capital operations. In June this year, the Beijing Renmin University of China Education Foundation appeared in the partner registry of the Shenzhen Chongtou No.1 Major Industrial Ecological Development Private Equity Investment Fund with a subscribed capital contribution of 20 million yuan. The foundation, established in 2004, raises and manages donated funds to support the university's education and research.

Its 2025 annual donation list reads like a roster of the alumni network itself: the GL Ventures Gaoli Education Development Fund, the JD Fund, and the Chongyang Investment Education Fund correspond to Zhang Lei, Liu Qiangdong and Qiu Guogen. The Ye Chenghai Fund belongs to the founder of Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals, a 1963 graduate of RUC's Department of International Politics.

Why RUC and Not a Polytechnic?

The answer starts with institutional history. RUC traces its origins to Shanbei Public School, founded in Yan'an in 1937 during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression — "China will not perish, for we have Shanbei Public School," went a line of the era. The university was officially established in Beijing on October 3, 1950, as the first new formal university of the People's Republic of China. From its founding, it ran departments such as Finance and Credit and Lending to train management cadres for the national financial system, giving its finance, statistics and economics disciplines a head start over other comprehensive universities.

In the Ministry of Education's fourth round of discipline evaluations, RUC secured nine A+ disciplines, including theoretical economics, applied economics, statistics and business administration — precisely the majors that feed the finance and venture capital industry. While other universities trained engineers, RUC systematically trained people who understood finance and macroeconomics, many of whom later started companies or invested.

The alumni network then compounds the advantage. Successful graduates feed money, disciplines connected to industrial directions such as the AI school, and informal venture capital support back into the pipeline of current students and young founders. In a market era defined by new quality productive forces and dominated by science-and-engineering narratives, the RUC Faction remains an easily overlooked but structurally durable force — and by every indicator in its pipeline, from expired-but-filed listings to a growing LP presence, it is set to keep growing.