Six Little Dragons: A microcosm of China's innovation ecology

For the first time, Hangzhou's six leading tech startups, collectively known as the "Six Little Dragons", shared one stage in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province. As the six young tech executives took their seats, the crowd leaned forward.

Rise: Six Little Dragons take the stage

Before them lay more than a discussion; it was a mirror of China's evolving innovation landscape. From humanoid robots to game, from brain-computer interfaces to large language models, the focus of these startups represent the emerging directions of China's tech innovation.

Ten years ago, China's internet giants propelled the country's digital rise. Ten years on, attention is turning to China's tech firms.

But this time, it's for the startups' frontier technology.

Today, a different generation is emerging: smaller, faster, and born in an era when global AI competition defines national ambition.

"Moving from the internet era to the age of artificial intelligence is not only a global technological tide, but also a reflection of China's own digital evolution," Huang Xiaohuang, co-founder of Manycore Tech, said.

Root: Where innovation grows

The "Six Little Dragons" refers to a group of rapidly-rising tech start-ups in Hangzhou — Game Science, DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics, DEEP Robotics, BrainCo, and Manycore Tech.

Feng Ji, a former Tencent game producer, founded a small studio called Game Science to focus on creating single-player games. He noted that China already had a large potential user base for PC and single-player games on Steam, the world's largest gaming platform in 2016.

Beside China's large user base, the founders also spoke about how they caught the wave of the country's growing opportunities for innovation.

Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree, said China has a great business environment to support startups. Wang, whose company's humanoid robot became a hit at this year's Spring Festival Gala, said Hangzhou's vibrant innovation ecosystem has given young entrepreneurs the chance to leverage their passion and potential, to realize more of their dreams and to make contributions to society.

Han Bicheng, BrainCo's founder, shared similar views with Wang.

"We found that the research and development of our products in the US was progressing slowly, so in 2018 we decided to move our headquarters back to Hangzhou," Han said. "The company has grown rapidly since then."

Roadmap: Next chapter of China's innovation

What these founders described reflects a changing environment that makes innovation possible in China.

As Steve Hoffman, angel investor and CEO of start-up accelerator Founders Space, observed, China's current startup and innovation environment is a high-octane, relentlessly competitive ecosystem that is transitioning from a focus on "copy-to-China" consumer models to becoming a world leader in hard-tech and deep-tech innovation.

A similar view was echoed by PwC, which noted that China's successful intelligent transformation of the entire industrial chain has positioned the country as a leading provider of digital solutions across all industrial sectors. With new infrastructure, from 5G and data centers to the industrial internet, the digital dividends are now shared across enterprises of all sizes, enhancing efficiency and supply resilience, according to a report released this year.

In the recently-released recommendations on the 15th Five-Year Plan that will guide the country's development over the next five years, policy-makers called for progressive plans to foster industries of the future, including brain-computer interfaces and embodied AI, while nurturing unicorn companies.

Startups like the "Six Little Dragons" stand at the intersection of these priorities.

Future: What is the positioning of AI?

Han Bicheng said his company is bringing brain-computer interface technology out of the lab and into daily life, helping people with disabilities control limbs with their minds, and enabling the visually impaired to "see" beyond the limits of human sight.

"Whether robotic dogs or humanoid robots, the aim is the same: to build machines that can stand in for humans where conditions are too dangerous, demanding or dull," Zhu Qiuguo, founder and CEO of DEEP Robotics, said.

In the long run, Chen Deli, DeepSeek senior researcher, said, tech firms should see themselves as guardians of humanity, protecting human safety and helping to reshape the social order in the age of AI.

Ma Mengmeng contributed to this story.