From Gaokao Dorm Room to Unicorn: GBA Startup Paths of PolyU Mainland-Student Alumni (Multi-Source Juxtaposition)

Module: 16 Mainland Students and the Two Places (Wild History section) Reading discipline: This module belongs to the 13–16 Wild History section — multi-source juxtaposition, no taking sides, no verdicts; for named living individuals, this follows the university's public commendation materials and does not speculate about undisclosed backgrounds; highly sensitive political touchpoints are handled only in the 17–18 link directories. This article focuses on startup cases of mainland-student alumni that PolyU has publicly commended, and does not extend to PolyU's mainland-student population as a whole, nor does it represent similar paths at other universities.

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# I. A gaokao candidate who scored 664 — and later founded a unicorn

In 2010, Wang Lei, a gaokao candidate from Yulin, Shaanxi, was admitted to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Department of Mechanical Engineering with a score of 664, and received a full scholarship for four consecutive years^※. This path does not differ from that of the many mainland candidates PolyU admits each year through its Mainland Undergraduate Admissions Scheme (see 16 Mainland Students · Overview and 02 Admissions · Undergraduate Admissions for details of the channel). According to PolyU's Mainland Admissions Leaflet^※, PolyU offers entrance scholarships to mainland applicants with outstanding gaokao results, with the amount able to cover full tuition for the duration of the undergraduate programme, plus an annual living allowance of HK$65,000; the term generally follows the length of the programme, typically four years (five for some programmes); selected students need not apply separately, as the university selects directly from the applicant pool. Wang Lei's admission to PolyU's Department of Mechanical Engineering with a score of 664 and his "full scholarship for four consecutive years" is a concrete instance of this scheme. What makes this account worth recording separately is what happened seven years later.

Credibility: verified (official) — the scholarship amount and selection method are given in PolyU's official mainland admissions leaflet; the specific fact that Wang Lei received the full scholarship is also set out in the table in Section I and in the PolyU Excel & Impact feature.

According to a feature article in PolyU's official publication Excel & Impact^※: after obtaining a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from PolyU in 2010, Wang Lei went on to pursue a PhD in new energy storage technology at the University of Hong Kong (graduating in 2014); in 2017, he co-founded EcoFlow (正浩) with partners, focused on portable energy storage devices. In 2021, EcoFlow became a tech unicorn valued at over US$1 billion, with operations in over a hundred countries and regions; as of the feature's publication, Wang Lei's team had obtained 285 patents cumulatively and published eight research papers on battery and energy storage technology.

Credibility: verified (official) — Wang Lei's admission background, degrees, startup timeline and honours are all set out in PolyU's official publication Excel & Impact, drawn from the university's public commendation materials.

In an interview, Wang Lei's own assessment of his alma mater was: 「理大的優良學術環境令我擁有紮實的專業知識和開闊的國際視野」("PolyU's excellent academic environment gave me solid professional knowledge and a broad international outlook")^※ — a fairly typical alumni remark, recorded here as stated, without further interpretation.

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# II. An electronics graduate's warehouse robots: Hai Robotics

Another company that emerged from the PolyU campus and also reached unicorn status is Hai Robotics (海柔創新). According to a feature article in PolyU's official publication Excel & Impact, 85th Anniversary Special Issue^※:

• Chen Yuqi, a graduate of PolyU's Department of Electronic and Information Engineering (class of 2012), co-founder and CEO of Hai Robotics;
• Fang Bing, a graduate of the same department (class of 2014), co-founder and COO of Hai Robotics;
• the two founded Hai Robotics in 2016, focused on case-handling warehouse robotics systems; its core product, the "Cubor" system, is described as the world's first automated case-handling storage robotics system, said to be able to increase warehouse storage density by 80%–130% and operational efficiency by 3–4 times;
• as of the feature's publication, Cubor had reportedly sold over 1,500 units globally, with operations across more than 20 countries and regions including mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Europe and the United States, and wholly owned subsidiaries in the US, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands;
• the company had cumulatively obtained more than 400 items of intellectual property.

Credibility: verified (official) — the founders' academic backgrounds and company figures are set out in PolyU's official publication feature article, drawn from the university's public commendation materials; the company's valuation (unicorn status) is cross-referenced against an independent source in Section III.

PolyU provided concrete financial support to Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing in the early stage of their venture — an RMB 200,000 cross-border startup seed fund and an HK$700,000 startup grant — which suggests that in Hai Robotics' growth path, PolyU functioned not only as an academic credential but also as one of the actual early-stage funders. This detail is logically consistent with the university's current GBA startup-incubation infrastructure discussed in Section IV below.

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# III. PolyU's presence on the unicorn list

In November 2021, the Hong Kong Institute for Innovative Technology published the "Hong Kong Unicorn List — Unicorns HK 2021"^※, listing 18 tech unicorns valued at over US$1 billion with a "Hong Kong genetic makeup" (founded, initially incubated, or headquartered in Hong Kong, or with a founder/co-founder who is a Hong Kong resident); the list included DJI, SenseTime, Lalamove, GOGOX, EcoFlow (正浩) and Hai Robotics, among others.

According to PolyU's official publication, a feature titled "PolyU Honours Outstanding Alumni" in Excel & Impact^※, at least two companies on that list — EcoFlow (Wang Lei) and GOGOX (Steven Or, a 2008 graduate of PolyU's School of Design in Advertising Design, co-founder and head of marketing and advertising) — have founding teams that include PolyU alumni; together with Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing of Hai Robotics noted above, PolyU has officially and publicly confirmed at least three unicorn-founder alumni across two companies.

Credibility: multi-source corroborated — the composition of the "Hong Kong Unicorn List — Unicorns HK 2021" is drawn from secondary financial-media reporting (pedaily.cn); the correspondence between PolyU alumni and these companies follows the list publicly commended in PolyU's official publications (only cases explicitly confirmed officially are counted; this site does not infer alumni status for other listed companies absent official confirmation).

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# IV. This path is not accidental: PolyU's GBA startup infrastructure

Wang Lei, Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing all built their ventures in Shenzhen — this is not a coincidence, but a natural extension of the GBA startup infrastructure PolyU has actively built in recent years.

According to the official page of PolyU's Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship Office^※, PolyU's current "GBA Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme" offers:

• HK$600,000 in seed funding, disbursed in milestone-based tranches;
• two years of incubation support, including mentoring, training and expert advisory;
• access to InnoHub co-working spaces PolyU has established in Hong Kong and mainland cities (including InnoHub@Shenzhen in Nanshan District, hosted by the PolyU Shenzhen Research Institute — see 09 Internationalisation · GBA and Mainland Research Presence);
• market-validation training, mainland site visits, and access to resources through PolyU's Mainland Technology Transfer Research Institute (MTRI) network.

The programme is funded through the Youth Development Fund under the "Greater Bay Area Youth Entrepreneurship Funding Scheme," and as of this site's verification, 12 funded teams (Y01–Y12) have been publicly listed.

Credibility: verified (official) — the funding amount, term and support content of the incubation programme are set out on the official page of PolyU's Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship Office.

The Shenzhen space this incubation programme relies on has its own documented establishment timeline. According to publicly available material from the PolyU Shenzhen Research Institute, PolyU InnoHub@Shenzhen (理大深圳創業中心) was established in 2015 within PolyU's Shenzhen base, and was registered as a maker-space with Guangdong Province and Shenzhen's Nanshan District in 2017; it is located at the "PolyU Industry-University-Research Building," 18 Yuexing First Road, Nanshan High-Tech Industrial Park South, Shenzhen, a building with a total floor area of approximately 12,500 square metres. In other words, when Wang Lei founded EcoFlow in 2017, and when Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing founded Hai Robotics in 2016, PolyU's startup-support space in Shenzhen was only just getting started or still under construction — in a sense, this cohort of alumni entrepreneurs grew almost in parallel with PolyU's Shenzhen startup infrastructure, rather than being one-sided beneficiaries of an already mature incubation system.

Credibility: multi-source corroborated — InnoHub@Shenzhen's founding year, registration date and address are given in publicly available material from PolyU's Shenzhen Research Institute and reproduced on third-party investment-promotion platforms, allowing cross-verification.

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# V. Identity narrative: the triple label of gaokao candidate, international student, entrepreneur

Looking back at the trajectories of Wang Lei, Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing, several partially overlapping identity labels are layered onto them:

1. Mainland gaokao candidate / graduate of the mainland admissions channel — the way they first entered PolyU aligns entirely with the structural fact described in 16 Mainland Students · Composition and Language, that "the share of mainland students among non-local students has risen year on year"; they are specific individual cases within the same institutional channel;
2. Beneficiaries of Hong Kong higher education — they completed their undergraduate or postgraduate studies within Hong Kong's English-medium teaching environment and mentorship system, and have publicly spoken positively of that experience (as in Wang Lei's remark quoted above);
3. Participants in the Greater Bay Area tech-startup ecosystem — their ventures are concentrated in Shenzhen, and their products and supply chains rely heavily on Pearl River Delta manufacturing, which echoes the mainland-focused logic PolyU repeatedly emphasises in 09 Internationalisation · GBA and Mainland Research Presence, centred on the Shenzhen Research Institute and the technology-transfer research institute network.

Where these three layers of identity overlap happens to echo the "internationalisation opportunity" reading this site proposed in 16 Mainland Students · Composition and Language — but this site reiterates here that two or three publicly verifiable success cases cannot be extended to represent the overall experience of PolyU's mainland-student population as a whole. For most PolyU mainland students, the more common path is further study, employment, or staying to work in Hong Kong (see the discussion of differences between postgraduate and undergraduate experience in 16 Mainland Students · Overview); entrepreneurship is just one path among these, and one that depends heavily on individual technical accumulation and market timing — it is not representative.

Credibility: analytical — the triple-identity framing in this section is this site's own structural reading based on the verified facts above, not a self-characterisation made by PolyU officially or by the individuals concerned.

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# VI. This site's boundaries: what this article does not do

• Does not treat individual cases as representative of the group: the entrepreneurial success of Wang Lei, Chen Yuqi and Fang Bing does not constitute an evaluation of PolyU's mainland students as a whole, nor should it be read as supporting a stereotype that "mainland students are more suited to entrepreneurship";
• Does not speculate about undisclosed personal background: beyond the region of origin, academic qualifications and startup timeline explicitly made public in PolyU's official publications, this site does not speculate about or supplement other personal information about the individuals concerned;
• Does not overstate the causal link between PolyU and startup success: PolyU's educational background and early-stage funding support are verifiable contributing factors, but whether a company ultimately becomes a unicorn depends on market conditions, capital, team composition and other variables this site cannot verify individually; this site does not offer a simplified causal account.

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