A prime forum of the 2025 World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit on Friday brought together executives of six Hangzhou-based tech startups to delve into the development trends of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Known as Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou, they are an informal grouping of Game Science, DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics, DEEP Robotics, BrainCo and Manycore Tech. All six companies hail from Hangzhou City in east China's Zhejiang Province, and lead in cutting-edge fields such as AI, robotics, gaming technology, brain-machine interface, and the metaverse.
The participating tech leaders believe that the emergence of innovative companies like the "Six Little Dragons" in the past two years is due to the integration of China's internet and a variety of technologies and industrial ecosystems.
"I believe that the transition from the internet era to the AI era is a global technological wave and also a microcosm of China's internet," said Huang Xiaohuang, founder and chairman of Manycore Tech.
Founded in 2011, Manycore Tech is a spatial intelligence enterprise powered by AI technologies and purpose-built graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters. It is seeking to become a global leader in spatial intelligence, a burgeoning field that blends AI with real-world spatial data to build what is referred to as a "world model".
"In China, we have a saying of Big Waves and Big Fish. In fact, the gaming industry has cultivated a huge number of users and talents. We are actually building upon this foundation, perhaps becoming just a small ripple," said Feng Ji, founder and CEO of Game Science.
Game Science, a Chinese video game development and publishing company founded in 2014, developed China's first AAA game masterpiece "Black Myth: Wukong".
"As you may have noticed over the last six months or a year, the embodied intelligence field has grown like a dream. I think that in the next few years, many science fiction concepts may accelerate their transition into reality. This progress also relies on China's current manufacturing capabilities, which are extremely strong, including core robot components. China has strong support and provides a good ecosystem for startups," said Wang Xingxing, founder and CEO of Unitree Robotics.
Unitree Robotics, a prominent Chinese robotics firm founded in 2016, is known for developing and manufacturing quadruped and humanoid robots. It gained attention for their dancing robots at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala.
From embodied intelligence to brain-computer interfaces, these once science fiction scenarios are rapidly becoming reality. At the event, the six representatives also shared their perspectives on the future development of their respective fields. China's development philosophy regarding the internet and AI has given them even more confidence in their companies' innovation efforts.
"We believe that collaboration and sharing brought about by open-source technology is another important core advantage for our company's development," said Chen Deli, a senior researcher at DeepSeek.
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek is carving its place in AI by delivering innovative and cost-effective solutions. Its performance is on par with ChatGPT, and it adopts a completely new training model, significantly reducing the cost of the reasoning model. Additionally, it boldly adopts an open-source model, allowing more users to easily try and deploy AI models.
"In the 15th Five-Year (2026-30) Plan [recommendations], China listed brain-computer interfaces for the first time as one of its six key cutting-edge technologies [for the future industries]," said Han Bicheng, founder and CEO of BrainCo.
Founded in 2015, BrainCo is a leading brain-computer interface company, with many products on the market for rehabilitation, healthcare and human-computer interaction.
"Robots have already been applied to many scenarios, and we hope that in the future our quadruped robot dog will be able to reach any place on land," said Zhu Qiuguo, founder and CEO of DEEP Robotics.
Deep Robotics, founded in 2017, has gained attention due to its development of quadruped robot dogs, which can traverse mountains and waters and perform spins and jumps with ease.
The WIC Wuzhen Summit is China's flagship annual event featuring discussions of global internet issues and policies. Held in east China's water town of Wuzhen, this year's summit runs from Friday to Sunday under the theme "Forging an Open, Cooperative, Secure and Inclusive Future of Digital Intelligence -- Building a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace".
Executives of tech startups delve into development trends of cutting-edge technologies
