May 13, 2026, Hong Kong, METiS TechBio: A Tech-Bio Company Focused on AI-Driven Nanodelivery InnovationMETiS TechBio (7666.HK)Successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today, becomingThe First Global AI Drug Delivery Stock, and also the first AI large molecule biopharmaceutical stock in the Hong Kong stock market. With the goal of becoming the "SpaceX" of the pharmaceutical industry, METiS TechBio has become the unicorn company that completed the IPO milestone in the shortest time in China's AI pharmaceutical industry after six years of entrepreneurship.

Fengrui was the first institutional investor in METiS TechBio and participated in four rounds of financing for METiS TechBio., respectively: At the end of 2019, led the angel round; in 2020, added investments in angel+ round and pre-A round; in 2021, added investment in A round.

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The Story of Fengrui and METiS TechBio

The story of Chris Lai, Chairman and CEO of METiS TechBio, and Fengrui can be traced back more than a decade. At that time, Chris Lai, who was still studying at MIT, embarked on his first entrepreneurial attempt with a water treatment project called Aqua Fresco. Thanks to Fengrui Capital's emphasis on the talent network of North American universities and the team’s frequent visits to the U.S. to explore projects, we had the opportunity to connect early with outstanding projects led by Chinese teams.

Ma Rui was deeply impressed by a transoceanic video conference with Lai Caida. It was 6 PM Beijing time in the evening,At 5 a.m. in Boston, Lai Caida enthusiastically demonstrated an anti-emulsification adsorbent material to Ma Rui between two large water tanks in the pilot plant.. This contact left Ma Rui with the impression that: the entrepreneur has positive values, is hardworking, and has ideals. Although from his many years of experience in environmental protection engineering, the market ceiling for the water treatment project itself is limited, this founder is worth tracking in the long term.

Li Feng said straightforwardly to Michael Lai in Boston, "I believe in you and your technology is very impressive, but this market is too small. The TAM (Total Addressable Market) may only be a few hundred million US dollars."If your next project involves something with a TAM of 1 billion US dollars, I will definitely be able to support it.”

This sentence became the starting point for subsequent cooperation between the two parties. Lai Caida said in an interview with Entrepreneur Magazine, "It's not that a company is successful just because the product is good and the technology is good."

In the summer of 2019, Wen Shuhao, the founder of XtalPi, a portfolio company of Frees Fund, created a group chat with Ma Rui and Li Feng, saying, "Here's an excellent project," referring to METiS TechBio. The business plan featured Lai Caida and Wang Wenshou (Co-founder and COO, who previously led the Inkbit project in Boston)—both were entrepreneurs Frees Fund had already connected with and held in high regard.

Wen Shuhao also gave a strong endorsement, "Chris is somewhat similar to me, but his abilities surpass mine.”

After meeting with Lai Caida for a detailed discussion, Ma Rui and Li Feng were in agreement: regardless of how many people are interested, they must invest.

Ma Rui's opinion is that, from the perspective of the project, the direction is promising. New formulation drugs have significant opportunities in both China and the U.S., and AI and computational methods are feasible while enabling differentiation. From the team perspective, the group has interdisciplinary backgrounds in pharmaceuticals, chemical engineering, and computation, with strong learning capabilities, and they have already established a presence for development in Shenzhen. Additionally, at the time, XtalPi indicated its intention to collaborate with METiS TechBio. Li Feng believes that METiS TechBio has a unique and solid foundation in formulation technology and data. The support from XtalPi can provide METiS TechBio with valuable experience in the AI + drug screening field, which is undoubtedly a major advantage for METiS TechBio. Moreover, Dr. Lai’s entrepreneurial ability and past experiences have been well validated.

Although the decision was made on the day of the meeting, it took about a month to finalize that Frees Fund would lead the angel round. In a recent conversation, Ma Rui told Lai Caida, "The wait at that time was very agonizing. I knew in my heart that there must have been other competitors, which is why it was so difficult to lock in the share."

Although Lai Caida chuckled, "It wasn't that popular," at the time, in order to secure this cooperation opportunity, the Fengrui team repeatedly communicated with Lai Caida. Meanwhile,The biomedicine and post-investment team actively collaborate by connecting with invested companies, introducing experts from the national formulation center and university professors, and other industry resources to enhance Fengrui's competitive advantage.

In the same year, Frees Fund became the angel round investor of METiS TechBio and secured a seat on the board. Immediately after, Ma Rui introduced Gong Yuan and Cao Xi from Sequoia Capital to Lai Caida, and soon METiS TechBio completed its angel+ round of financing. Following this, the market enthusiasm for METiS TechBio rapidly increased, with the company completing multiple rounds of financing in succession, building sufficient capital reserves for the subsequent industry downturn. Lai Caida said, "Our judgment at that time was quite correct—when the market is about to rise, we must move quickly in small steps, accumulating enough resources so that we can navigate through the 'valley of death.'"

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From 0 to IPO: Why We Are Optimistic About METiS TechBio and What We Have Learned from Investing in METiS TechBio?

In a recent conversation between Ma Rui and Lai Caida, Ma Rui summarized the rationale behind our continued optimism toward METiS TechBio and shared what he has learned from the company's development journey, particularly from Lai Caida.

Cognitive Support — AI × Drug Interdisciplinary Innovation.Fengrui's strength lies in cross-disciplinary fields, with the advantage being that they focus on both AI and pharmaceuticals. So when Lai Caida started talking about dosage forms, we immediately understood. We know that new dosage forms are tied to innovative drugs, which is an even bigger deal than polymorph screening.

Technical Feasibility — First Principles. At that time, everyone was explaining "how to solve data problems using computational methods," which is now called synthetic data.

Lai Caida gave an example on the whiteboard: if calculating crystal forms, it’s somewhat similar to calculating AAA; but if calculating formulations, it’s more like calculating ABC. We immediately understood his meaning: this task is definitely a bit more complex than crystal form calculations in terms of first principles, but it’s something doable. Combined with Academician Chen's high-throughput platform and using reinforcement learning to reduce dimensionality for formulation calculations, this was a very complete story from the start.

Team Combination. Lai Caida pays great attention to people's emotions and details, and is very decisive - these are important qualities for a CEO. Academician Chen previously worked on drug listings in the United States. Wang Wenshou is also a entrepreneur we have dealt with before, and he is very mature. The combination of these three with a chemical engineering background is analogous to the combination of three physics backgrounds at XtalPi, a very good mix.

METiS TechBio's Position: The Framework of a Third-Generation AI Pharmaceutical Company

The First Generation: AI is relatively early-stage deep learning, still in the initial phase of drug development.

• The second generation: excellent small molecules or bispecific antibodies were developed, but they were not driven by AI natively; instead, they relied more on biotech capabilities.

• The Third Generation: Represented by METiS TechBioAI-native company. Moreover, METiS TechBio has chosen an approach that aligns with new drug modalities — in the future, there may be an increasing number of new therapies such as mRNA, in vivo CAR-T, TCE, and gene editing. These therapies may seem simple (just coding), but the biggest bottleneck is delivery — how to deliver the "code" at the right time, to the right tissue, and into the right cells to take effect. Therefore, METiS TechBio is a company that we believe has great potential in this generation.

Founder Decision Quality

Over the years, Lai Caida, as the founder, has made many key decisions correctly:

• Return to China full-time for entrepreneurship——At that time, he was a young man from Taiwan studying in the United States, and had never studied, lived, or worked in mainland China, but he almost immediately decided to return and start a business.

• Unwinding Red Chip——At that time, many people wanted to keep the red chip for a future listing in the U.S., but METiS TechBio resolutely dismantled it.

• No split LNP——At that time, we once discussed with Lai Caida about incubating an independent LNP company, but he decided to keep it within the company. If we had taken a slightly circuitous route, the company's development might have been affected.

• From Formulation to Delivery——Expand the initial improved formulation of new drugs to delivery systems that are compatible with all new drug forms such as mRNA, in vivo, and CAR-T. Moreover, the blueprint for LNP was actually present in the day one BP.

• Full-spectrum financing capability——METiS TechBio secured early-stage funding from Frees Fund and Source Code Capital, followed by well-known dollar funds like Lightspeed, Sequoia, and 5Y Capital. It then attracted insurance capital and, in the Pre-IPO stage, received investment from state-owned capital in Beijing and Daxing. Lai Caida successfully communicated the company’s value and vision to all types of investors.

Resonance at the Same Frequency. In these years of early-stage investment, a question we often hear is "How can entrepreneurs impress investors?" But in fact, if we are humble enough, Ma Rui thinks the reverse question is more important — at the very early stage, how can investors win over the hearts of entrepreneurs? Early-stage investment is actually a two-way selection; the resonance between investors and founders is crucial. Ma Rui believes that he and Chris share great synergy, as both transitioned from environmental protection to biomedicine. Later, they reached another consensus: they must focus on drug development. Although AI-driven drug discovery does have its bubbles, ultimately, it's about delivering molecules and creating real drugs. This is also a key anchor point for Frees Fund when evaluating AI drug discovery projects.

Believe and then see.Lai Caida once said to Ma Rui: "Many investors really need to see something before they can believe it. But in your case, it’s more about believing first and then seeing that we can make this happen." At the time, Lai hadn’t prepared much of a business plan (BP); instead, he just drew the principles on a whiteboard for the investors. Ma Rui said, "Fengrui really likes this approach. If you can stand up and draw the principles on the whiteboard, we can make a decision. First-principles thinking is far more important than packaging."

Dare to speak the truth.When Lai Caida was selecting investors that month, Ma Rui said something to him with rather low emotional intelligence: "Your current ability can probably bring the company to a valuation of about 200-300 million US dollars; when it reaches 1 billion US dollars, you must do these things." In Lai Caida's view, this was actually a plus — a truly good investor doesn't flatter entrepreneurs but genuinely helps them think about how to grow. This statement also served as "a wake-up call" for him at the time.

Angels are here to support, not to take the quota and leave.When METiS TechBio successively received follow-up financing, the shares were in short supply. An FA once told Lai Caida, "FREES Fund is an early-stage angel investor; you don't need to allocate so much quota to it." Later, Lai Caida realized that this was not the case — FREES Fund has always been a long-term companion. At many critical moments, they discussed strategy, direction, and talent with Chris. Such trust is absolutely not built by investing in just one round. It is through participation and collaboration in every round that deep trust is established, paving the way for open and honest communication in the future.

After walking through this decade, Ma Rui has several most important insights:

• Maintain the depth of cross-disciplinary research and stay diligent.

• To make decisions and judgments from first principles

• Listen to opinions, but also stick to your own judgment.

• Investors should place more trust in entrepreneurs and technology.METiS TechBioIt is a company that we have invested in from the first round and accompanied all the way to its IPO. This journey, rather than being just an investment story, is essentially a path of mutual trust, learning, and encouragement between the founder and investors—a story of a decade-long partnership.

  
  

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Fengrui's AI Drug Discovery and AI4S Investment Layout

In 2016, Frees Fund had the fortune to connect with Xtalpi in its early stage, and in 2019, it led the angel round investment in METiS TechBio and subsequently invested in four more rounds. Today, Xtalpi has become the "first AI pharmaceutical stock" (2228.HK) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and METiS TechBio is now among the "Top Three AI Pharmaceutical Companies."

It is truly rewarding to witness and accompany the growth of two outstanding companies on this track. Behind this success lies a mix of good fortune as well as our commitment to researching cutting-edge interdisciplinary fields and upholding independent thinking and judgment. When we invested in METiS TechBio, "AI-driven pharmaceuticals" were far from being as popular as they are today. However, we believed that leveraging a "physics + AI" approach for crystal structure calculations indeed had the potential to outperform traditional methods.

After investing in METiS TechBio,We are beginning to systematically explore and layout along the entire pharmaceutical chain.: After polymorph comes dosage form, which is what METiS TechBio has been doing over the past decade. Moving downstream from molecular design, we have invested in ChemAI Tech, which specializes in retrosynthetic analysis, and CommaDx, which focuses on lead compound screening. At the same time, we are also paying attention to different drug modalities—covering small molecules, antibodies, cyclic peptides, RNA (for example, Hengyu Bio), as well as delivery systems and virtual cells (Biolume Tech). In the era of large model-driven generative AI, in 2024, we led the angel round investment in IntelliGen AI, a company specializing in foundational biological models. In 2025, we invested in Zhongqi Wuliang, a company working on quantum computing.

Extend the paradigm of AI-driven drug discovery further: In the field of materials science, we invested in TopoGenesis; in the brain-computer interface sector, we successively invested in innovative companies such as Ubrain Galaxy and Apex Medical; in the biomanufacturing space, we have positioned ourselves with companies like Bluepha Microbes, Synbio Technologies, Yanwei Tech, and Chasing Technology. These may appear to be entirely different sectors, but we believe...Their underlying logic is the same — using AI to drive scientific discovery (AI4S).

From AI pharmaceuticals to the broader AI4S, the reason why Frees Fund dares to systematically layout in these frontier directions, rather than betting on a single point, is more due to our long-term optimism about China's technological innovation as an early-stage investment institution. This has allowed us to have the privilege of meeting and accompanying a group of entrepreneurs who possess core barriers and a global vision. Behind this lies not only Li Feng's long-term insight into macro trends but also the investment team's persistent interdisciplinary research and accumulated efforts.

In conclusion

We are truly delighted for the achievements of the METiS TechBio team as we have accompanied them from their angel round all the way to their IPO. From transoceanic calls at 5 a.m. nearly a decade ago, to candid exchanges in Boston, to the angel investment decided on the very day we met in 2019, and now to METiS TechBio's listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange—this is not only a defining moment for METiS TechBio but also a heartwarming affirmation of our investment philosophy: "Believe first, then see."

Congratulations to METiS TechBio! We also look forward to METiS TechBio continuing to innovate in the AI-driven drug delivery field, becoming the SpaceX of the pharmaceutical industry, and bringing better treatment options to more patients.

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