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The Hong Kong investor putting American money into China’s AI push
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. HONG KONG—In his two decades at Silicon Valley venture-capital titan Sequoia, Neil Shen made billions by identifying and investing in every major tech company to emerge in China. Now, the Chinese billionaire is betting big on artificial intelligence, using American capital to fund Chinese firms competing in the global AI race.
U.S. rules bar U.S. investment via venture funds into Chinese companies developing certain advanced AI models.
Shen has nonetheless been able to direct money into sophisticated AI startups in China, in part because he raised U.S. money before Washington introduced the limits. Shen raised nearly $9 billion from U.S.
pension funds and endowments, including Calpers and the University of California system before spinning out Sequoia China from its parent in 2023. He’s since invested in Chinese companies developing large language models and others building robots and consumer apps using AI. He has already picked winners.
Shen’s firm, now rebranded as HSG, was one of the early investors in Manus, an AI-powered tool for longer tasks such as writing research reports that Meta Platforms agreed to buy in December. Hong Kong-based Shen first invested in 2024 when Manus was worth $85 million. A little over a year later, Manus sold for more than $2 billion.
He also invested in the Chinese AI-model firms Moonshot AI, StepFun and MiniMax. MiniMax has a companion app called Talkie that is popular in the U.S. and listed in Hong Kong in January.
It is trading at more than fivefold its initial public offering price. The 58-year-old has long bridged the U.S. and China markets.
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21.05 / 10:17
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How chronic illness became a starting point for artistic alchemy for Koshy Brahmatmaj
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Pain is invisible; the sufferer has to make noise for it to be acknowledged, treated or accepted. Mumbai-based artist Koshy Brahmatmaj, 34, lives with chronic endometriosis, a painful condition that afflicts millions of women around the world.
21.05 / 10:17
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Even at $5 trillion, Nvidia is underappreciated
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Nvidia is no longer the only AI chip game in town. But it is the largest by far, and the likelihood that it will be that way for the foreseeable future should count for something.It hasn’t counted for much lately.
21.05 / 10:17
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RK Swamy bets on integrated advertising model as global agency giants split media and creative
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Homegrown advertising group RK Swamy Ltd is betting on its integrated marketing model to drive growth over the next few years, combining media, creative and other advertising services even as the ‘Big Four’ agency networks increasingly separate those businesses.“We never did disaggregated media and creative [although] that was an option 20 years ago,” Shekhar Swamy, MD and group CEO of RK Swamy Ltd told Mint in an interview.“How can you disaggregate the two? The media function holds a lot of data, and then when media and creative walk separately, it creates a lot of tension. This is not a sensible model for a client.”RK Swamy’s clients include Magicbricks, Polycab, and several government institutions and PSUs such as LIC.The company reported a 15% jump in annual revenue for FY26 to ₹351.73 crore, while profit before tax and exceptional items rose 30% year-on-year to ₹32.2 crore.
21.05 / 09:47
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SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI’s sprint to go public defines the AI boom’s big day
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It all happened in one day.Three of the hottest startups in history moved closer Wednesday to becoming trillion-dollar companies. With a fresh filing, SpaceX showed the path to a landmark IPO likely to mint Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.
21.05 / 09:47
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FPIs exit Korea & Taiwan: Is India ready for the flow rotation?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Foreign investors have spent much of this year cutting exposure to Indian equities, diverting some capital to Taiwan and South Korea amid an AI-driven rally and robust semiconductor earnings. However, recent selling in those East Asian markets has brought the conversation surrounding foreign flows back to India.According to Bloomberg data, Foreign portfolio investors have pulled nearly $23.4 billion from Indian equitiesso far this year, driven by stretched valuations, rupee weakness and softer earnings growth expectations.
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PI Industries’ weak core business keeps investors on edge
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.PI Industries stock has fallen 11% over the past two trading sessions as pressure in its custom synthesis and manufacturing (CSM) business persisted. CSM revenues have now declined year-on-year for five consecutive quarters. The segment, which contributed about 75% of the agrochemicals maker’s FY26 revenue of ₹6,714 crore, saw revenue fall 16% year-on-year.Weak demand and customers’ shift to just-in-time procurement continued to weigh on the CSM business, where revenue declined 15% in the March quarter (Q4FY26), though that marked an improvement from the 32% drop in Q3FY26.Management said the global crop-protection market remains stuck in a prolonged multi-year downturn, resulting in an uneven recovery.
21.05 / 09:47
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‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’ has left audiences stunned but what they saw wasn’t all that bizarre
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the new Netflix documentary series Should I Marry a Murderer?, Caroline Muirhead, a Scottish forensic pathologist, falls in love with Sandy McKellar, a man who, after proposing, reveals to her that he and his brother have committed a homicide. What follows is baffling: Even after Muirhead turns him in to the police, she returns to his side.
21.05 / 08:45
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Secured credit cards: Unlocking credit and building a credit score for millions
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.There has been growing awareness about credit cards in India, but the number of users still remains low, with 118.6 million credit cards issued as of end-March, a penetration of only 8.5%. This is because of strict credit appraisal processes that leave a large segment of the population underserved.In such a scenario, customers can opt for a secured or fixed deposit (FD)-backed credit card instead of the ubiquitous unsecured card.
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Forensic audits support corporate-fraud probes and IBC cases but still lack enforceable standards
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Forensic audits have gained significance in today’s world of business as they serve as a useful tool for commercial lenders to investigate fraud by borrowers and/or identify other deep-seated financial irregularities. Forensic auditors are also employed by resolution professionals to report on preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate (‘PUFE’) transactions for adjudication under India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). While there is no single universal definition, several globally recognized organizations have provided widely accepted definitions (and norms) of forensic auditing.
21.05 / 08:45
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Why Dixon, Syrma and Kaynes are moving beyond smartphones: margin pressure
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.MUMBAI: India’s listed electronics manufacturers are under pressure to defend profitability as the mobile-phone assembly boom slows, prompting a shift towards higher-value industrial electronics.Investors remained jittery through the last fiscal, driven by concerns that slowing consumer sentiment could weigh on the rapid growth that electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firms have delivered so far.In an interview with Mint, Jasbir Singh Gujral, managing director of Syrma SGS Technology Ltd, India’s second-largest listed EMS firm, said, “We’re increasingly looking to capture a larger chunk of contracts from defence, aerospace and med-tech verticals, all of which represent opportunities for original design manufacturing, and also bring significantly higher margins. We’ve already started this transition, and we plan to do more of it this fiscal.”Beyond mobile phones and laptops, EMS firms are expanding into smart metres for electricity boards, aerospace and defence subsystems, railway safety instrumentation, printed circuit boards and display assemblies, and medical devices deployed in hospitals.India’s annual mobile phone shipments have remained subdued since the covid-19 pandemic, with industry estimates pointing to a single-digit decline this calendar year from 152 million smartphones shipped last year.The margin pressure driving this shift is increasingly visible.In FY26, Syrma SGS reported an operating margin of 7.1%, up 2.3 percentage points.
