+31.5%
The year-over-year growth rate in disclosed venture and growth-stage deal value in China's highest-momentum sectors, reflecting the AI-driven rebound rather than the market as a whole.
A single aggregate China VC market figure fell for three consecutive years (2021 through 2024, detailed in a related Fact), which makes a positive year-over-year growth figure like this one easy to misread as a broad market recovery. It is not. This growth rate is concentrated in a narrow set of state-priority sectors, most visibly AI foundation models and infrastructure, where 2025–2026 funding activity (including the Zhipu AI and MiniMax Hong Kong listings in January 2026) has been genuinely exceptional even as the market's foreign-participation rate kept falling over the same period.
The practical lesson for a foreign investor: a headline growth number like this should always prompt the follow-up question of which sector, which currency, and which investor base is actually driving it, rather than being read as evidence that the broad-based, foreign-accessible market of 2018 has returned.
Methodology
Calculated as the year-over-year change in disclosed deal value across the sectors and period showing the strongest growth; not a whole-of-market average, which remains well below this figure once state-priority sectors are excluded.
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