嘉立创敲钟 钟鼎资本押注“基础设施”的跃迁之路

This article details the full story of how investment firm ZhenFund bet on JLC, a leader in electronic R&D infrastructure, supported its successful A-share listing and helped it grow into a RMB 100 billion+ market cap company. It also shares ZhenFund’s long-term investment logic. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. JLC’s core development achievements: Starting out as a PCB prototyping service provider, JLC leverages industrial software and digital flexible manufacturing to connect non-standard demand with automated production. This innovation cut prototyping costs from thousands of RMB to tens of RMB, and reduced delivery lead time to just 2-3 days. After completing full industrial chain integration, JLC has delivered strong growth. In 2025, it posted RMB 10.231 billion in revenue and RMB 1.306 billion in net profit, with nearly 9.6 million cumulative registered users for its EDA software. It is now a foundational infrastructure supporting global hardware innovation.

2. Investment insights for individual investors: For individual investors building asset allocation and selecting investment targets, it is advisable to anchor on the era’s core infrastructure sectors, and prioritize targets that solve genuine industry pain points, are led by management with long-term strategic focus, and have strong competitive moats. This approach increases the likelihood of generating stable, cycle-resilient returns.

This article offers valuable insights for brands looking to enter the B2B electronic R&D service sector and build long-term competitive advantages. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Industry and consumer trends: The rapid growth of global hardware innovation and physical AI has driven surging demand for fragmented, non-standard, small-batch PCB prototyping in electronic R&D. Traditional PCB players have long focused on large-volume orders, leaving this segment undersupplied and overpriced, creating significant market opportunities for brands that can address this pain point.

2. Lessons for brand building: JLC built strong brand recognition among 10 million engineers globally by consistently meeting genuine customer needs over the long term, and this user trust is its deepest competitive moat. Compared to short-term marketing spend, long-term commitment to understanding user needs and delivering long-term value builds far more hard-to-replicate brand advantages.

3. Guidance for product R&D strategy: JLC adopted a full-link integration strategy, building a complete closed loop from EDA design, PCB manufacturing, component sourcing to SMT placement. This approach not only improves customer stickiness but also spreads costs across scale, a one-stop ecosystem R&D path that B2B R&D service brands can learn from.

This article outlines market opportunities, growth paths and risk warnings for sellers in the electronic R&D and manufacturing sectors. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Market opportunities: Global hardware innovation and AI iteration have driven rapid growth in small-batch, non-standard demand in electronic R&D, creating a large supply gap in the traditional industry. Small and medium-sized sellers can enter niche segments to match market demand and capture industry growth dividends.

2. A replicable growth path: Sellers can learn from JLC’s model: starting from the niche PCB prototyping segment, gradually expanding business scope, and ultimately completing full industrial chain integration. By centering on genuine customer needs, laying out long-term business strategies, and accumulating user recognition and technical barriers step by step, sellers can achieve sustained, stable growth.

3. Risk and opportunity notes: This sector has extremely high four-fold barriers to entry, making it hard for new players to break into the full-link market in the short term. Small and medium-sized sellers should avoid blind expansion, instead positioning themselves in clear niche segments, connecting to the ecosystem of leading platforms like JLC, and growing stably by participating in industrial chain division of labor.

This article offers important insights for traditional electronic manufacturing factories pursuing digital transformation and new growth points. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New production demand and business opportunities: Demand for non-standard prototyping (small-batch, multi-variety, fast-delivery) in electronic R&D is growing rapidly. Most traditional manufacturing factories focus on large-volume orders, leaving a large supply gap in this segment that represents a major new growth opportunity for traditional players.

2. Lessons for digital transformation: JLC’s transformation experience is a useful reference. By leveraging cloud-based EDA and CAM industrial software, JLC connected front-end user non-standard demand with back-end automated production to achieve flexible manufacturing, drastically cutting production costs and reducing delivery lead times. Traditional factories can follow this path, rolling out industrial software applications and digital upgrades to match new market demand.

3. Collaboration opportunities: JLC has built a full-link R&D and manufacturing ecosystem with strong demand for upstream and downstream supporting production. Traditional manufacturing factories can connect to JLC’s ecosystem to secure stable orders, and complete their own technology upgrades with ecosystem resources.

This article outlines industry trends, customer pain points and reference solutions for service providers in electronic R&D and AI infrastructure. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Industry development trends: The growth of smart manufacturing and AI has driven rapid expansion of two major sectors: electronic R&D infrastructure and new AI infrastructure. Demand for one-stop full-link services and underlying computing infrastructure continues to grow, leaving significant untapped market space for service providers.

2. Core customer pain points: In traditional electronic R&D, small-batch prototyping suffers from undersupply, high costs and long lead times; in AI infrastructure, innovative technologies lack channels to connect with industrial scenarios for commercialization. Service providers are needed to integrate resources to solve these problems.

3. Reference solutions: Service providers can learn from ZhenFund’s ecosystem service model: binding with leading industrial chain players, sourcing underlying innovation projects upstream, and connecting innovative companies with industrial resources to help commercialize technologies, forming a positive reinforcement loop between the service side and the industrial side. They can also draw on JLC’s one-stop model, integrating multi-link resources to improve customer stickiness.

This article offers valuable references for B2B R&D manufacturing platforms on operations management, barrier building and risk mitigation. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Core customer demand for platforms: Customers in electronic R&D need one-stop services covering the entire process from design, prototyping to component sourcing and placement. Single-link services cannot meet customer demand or build high customer stickiness.

2. Lessons for platform operations management: Platforms can learn from JLC’s experience of integrating four internal business units to build a full-link closed loop. This model generates network effects to improve customer stickiness, and leverages mass panel sharing production to increase raw material utilization, continuously lowering marginal costs and building sustainable cost advantages.

3. Barrier building and risk mitigation: Platforms need to build competitive barriers across four dimensions: user mindshare, underlying industrial software technology accumulation, order scale and national production capacity layout, to effectively fend off competition from new entrants. Meanwhile, platforms should anchor their positioning as infrastructure, make long-term layouts centered on genuine demand, and avoid chasing short-term hype, which effectively reduces operational risk and helps the business navigate industry cycles.

This article provides updated case studies and industry insights for researchers focused on smart manufacturing and venture capital. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New industry trends: A full-link integrated one-stop infrastructure platform has emerged in the electronic R&D sector, and JLC’s successful IPO has validated the commercial viability of this model. Against the AI boom, investors have already begun early布局 in full-chain AI infrastructure, focusing on three core categories: new computing power, new storage and optical interconnection. Four major industry trends are worth noting: shift from model training to inference, shift from 2D to 3D, shift from electronics to photonics, and global expansion of competitive supply chains.

2. A new investment business model: ZhenFund has developed a mature infrastructure investment methodology called the "resource runway model", which is implemented in three steps: focus on core tracks, bind with leading industry chain players, and source underlying innovation upstream. It has also built a positive reinforcement loop between investment and industrial sides, integrating ecosystem resources through a win-win mindset, which is a new investment model worthy of in-depth study.

3. A new business model for smart manufacturing: JLC pioneered a new flexible manufacturing model that uses industrial software to connect non-standard demand with automated production, solving long-standing industry pain points and building four layers of hard-to-replicate barriers. It provides a representative case study for the transformation and upgrading of Chinese manufacturing.