miHoYo exits brain-computer startup Lingweiyisi as university fund takes control
What's the deal? Chinese brain-computer interface startup Lingweiyisi has completed a restructuring that saw gaming giant miHoYoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → exit its shareholder roster, with Hanyuan Asset of Shanghai Jiao Tong University taking exclusive control via an early-stage investment of several million yuan.
Who's behind it? Founded in late 2021 by Lv Baoliang, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Lingweiyisi started in affective brain-computer interface technology. It explored using EEG and eye-movement signals to assess emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety, launching the multimodal "Emotion X-ray Machine."
What's the money for? The funds will go toward hiring and research on a foundational electroencephalogram (EEG) model. Co-founder and general manager Shi Lichen — a Shanghai Jiao Tong doctorate who previously worked at Didi, Baidu, and Huolala — said the company will expand into foundational EEG models and general neural decoding platforms.
What's the endgame? Shi framed the shift as "an extension from specific applications to underlying common technologies, rather than switching to a completely new track." Traditional EEG algorithms are tightly bound to specific devices and tasks, forcing data collection and model training to restart whenever the scenario changes. A foundational model trained on large volumes of unlabelled data could cut that cost and generalise across users and devices.
Why now? The exit marks diverging bets by Chinese game makers on frontier hardware. miHoYoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → had held a 49% stake in Lingweiyisi; its departure hands a university-linked investor full control of the company.
The signal: China's broader BCI sector is drawing far larger sums — Shanghai's NeuroXess announced a US$96.3M Series B in October — and the city is building dedicated industry infrastructure. Against that backdrop, Lingweiyisi's several-million-yuan round is a modest, early-stage bet. The more notable story is the ownership shift from a cash-rich gaming studio to academic capital, betting on foundational research over near-term commercialisation.
Read more: eu.36kr.com
Image credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video
