Guangfan Technology, an AI-native wearable startup founded by Xiaomi’s 89th employee Dong Hongguang, has raised 130 million yuan (US$18 million) across two funding rounds within three months. The company is now valued at over 500 million yuan (US$69 million).

Backers include key players across the wearable hardware supply chain such as Shokz, Goertek’s venture arm, LingYi Venture, and the family office of GigaDevice founder Zhu Yiming. Several financial investors also joined the rounds, including CDH Investments, Alpha Startups, Inno Angel, and Tsinghua Capital.

Guangfan is developing general-purpose AI wearables that aim to reimagine human-computer interaction through multimodal interfaces. The company believes the current wave of large language models and multimodal AI will push wearables beyond their function-specific roots toward more adaptive, intelligent agents over the next five years.

Founder Dong brings 14 years of experience from Xiaomi, where he helped launch the MIUI operating system and later led core initiatives in fast apps and custom operating systems for smartphones and vehicles. Guangfan’s team includes former engineers and product leaders from Huawei, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent.

The startup enters a competitive yet fragmented AI hardware space. While some companies are betting on embodied intelligence and others on acquiring mature hardware assets, Guangfan positions itself as an agile player backed by deep industrial ties and technical expertise.

The company’s investor lineup reflects this hybrid approach, blending strategic supply chain partners with institutional capital. Whether Guangfan can translate its momentum into market-ready products will be a key test in the evolving AI wearables race.

🔗 Source: 36Kr

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ China’s wearable tech ecosystem leverages strategic vertical integration

Lightboat’s investor lineup reveals a strategic pattern common in China’s tech sector: bringing together companies across the entire supply chain for competitive advantage.

Their investment from bone-conduction headphone leader Shokz, ODM giant Goertek, chip maker GigaDevice, and battery manufacturer CATL represents a vertically integrated consortium covering every critical component of wearable development.

This approach mirrors the ecosystem strategy that helped Chinese smartphone makers rapidly scale in the 2010s, where tight coordination between suppliers and manufacturers created efficiencies competitors couldn’t match.

The global wearable technology market is projected to grow from $70.3 billion in 2024 to $152.82 billion by 2029 at a 16.8% CAGR, making these ecosystem advantages increasingly valuable 1.

For tech startups, this highlights how strategic investor selection can provide operational advantages beyond just capital, especially in hardware-intensive segments where supply chain relationships are critical.

2️⃣ Experienced founders fuel second-wave hardware innovation

Lightboat exemplifies an emerging pattern of experienced tech executives founding AI hardware startups after long tenures at established giants.