China News Service, Suzhou, November 13 (Reporters Tang Juan, Chang Mucheng, Ge Yong, Wang Hao) In the summer of 2026, Mega Technology appeared on both Fortune China's top 50 technology lists and Forbes China's top 50 artificial intelligence companies. The founder of this hard technology unicorn with a valuation of over 10 billion yuan, Huang Yuqing, is 41 years old.
When he and two colleagues quit their jobs to start their own business ten years ago, life science automation was a term that few people understood. Ten years later, Mega's smart laboratories have been implemented in many leading pharmaceutical companies and scientific research institutions across the country.
This is the story of a man with an engineering degree breaking into hard technology. It is also a cross-section of how China’s private companies in hard technology break through.
The choice of three engineering men
In 2016, Huang Yuqing was 31 years old. He studied communications engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University as an undergraduate, and worked in a precision analytical instrument company after graduation. Eight years later, he and his two colleagues Qiao Zhixin and Zhang Yan decided to start a business, focusing on life science automation.
Huang Yuqing said: "The original intention of starting a business is very simple: to use robots to liberate the hands of scientists, and to use artificial intelligence to arm the minds of scientists."
At that time, China Mobile Internet was at its peak, and investors were concerned about the number of daily active users and gross merchandise volume (GMV). Three engineering men went to talk about "using robots to accelerate the research and development of new drugs", and most investors reacted blankly.
"At that time, investors didn't understand it at all, or more investors were listening to me about Mega's mission and vision with a big question mark."
Some people in the industry call them "PPT companies", but Huang Yuqing has his own judgment. "Many single-point tools are actually very advanced and highly automated, but what restricts the development of this industry is actually the connection between equipment. Many high-value assets are trapped in relatively inefficient operations and tasks."
Starting a new business after taking a detour
In the first three years of starting a business, Mega took a detour.
The team is focused on developing the “cheapest, easiest to use and safest” intelligent robot body in the world, starting from the bottom motion control and core components. When the prototype was launched on the market in 2018, Huang Yuqing discovered that "what the customer actually wanted was not the robot itself, but a solution. Just like what we often need is not this hammer, what I want is to smash nails into the wall."
In June 2019, the theme of Mega's third anniversary annual meeting was "Restarting a Business".
Putting all the past three years aside - tens of millions of investments and all the efforts of all employees. Before making this decision, Huang Yuqing couldn't sleep well for more than a month.
"On the one hand, you have to convince yourself, but on the other hand, work transformation does not actually solve the ultimate problem. The more critical question is what to do after the transformation. In the end, when you make up your mind, you will face many difficult challenges at the execution level, such as the reduction and adjustment of the team, and the need to reunite people."
Most teams will choose to "persist a little longer" after going in the wrong direction, but Huang Yuqing is just the opposite. He has an almost ruthless ability to cut the money and time that have been invested. In the dictionary of entrepreneurs, "stop loss in time" often requires more courage than "persistence".
“No Plan B”
During the interview, Huang Yuqing mentioned one word many times: there is no Plan B.
At the first product launch in 2017, he said internally: "There is no Plan B in this matter. It's a last-ditch fight. Only success is allowed, no failure." This sentence later became the company's cultural creed.
Winning investment from Germany's Bosch in 2019 is one of Magga's most difficult battles. There are many senior industry experts from Germany on the Bosch Investment Committee.
"Germany is one of the strongest countries in the world in the field of robotics. Why should I invest in a Chinese robotics start-up company?" Huang Yuqing said. The negotiations lasted for more than a year, and the company could not even pay next month's salary. All employees were suspended from pay, and his two partners took photos of the real estate certificate and sent it to the group within one minute - "I will mortgage it tomorrow. If I can't get the mortgage, I will sell it." In the end, such persistence paid off.
In August 2020, a partner came to the door: using robots to do nucleic acid testing, but "no money", hoping that Mega would invest.
"At that time, the company only had 20 million yuan in capital. If it was invested in doing it, once it was not completed, the company would basically be gone and go bankrupt. Moreover, the technical difficulty of the project itself was also very high, and no one had done it at the time."
Huang Yuqing was selected to do it, and two-thirds of the company's projects were stopped.
"The meeting was held at 3 p.m. on August 4, the project team was established at 5 p.m., the plan was presented at 8 p.m., and finalized at 9 a.m. the next day. It only took 25 days from starting from scratch to delivering the first product."
Huang Yuqing clearly remembers that she promised her customers that the goods would be delivered at 12 o'clock that night, but the most important materials did not arrive at the factory until 10 o'clock in the evening. When the colleagues in charge of the supply chain saw this, they squatted on the ground and cried.
Huang Yuqing is from Chaoshan. "Most of my family members are in business. Chaoshan people are brave enough to work hard and would rather sleep on the floor than be a boss. From a young age, I learned to be the first, to face challenges head-on, and to remain optimistic about the future under difficult conditions."
Persistence is the only Plan A
In the Magnesium Kunpeng Laboratory, eight scientists used AI agents to increase the antibody prediction accuracy from 70% to 90% in just 4 months. The traditional method requires 40 to 50 people and takes 3 to 4 years.
Huang Yuqing judged that the first half of AI is in the digital world, and the second half will enter the physical world such as laboratories and factories to perform tasks. Scientific intelligence is "not a model problem, but an infrastructure problem" - the speed of AI's virtual design has far exceeded the speed of verification in the physical world, and the bottleneck lies in the latter.
He believes that Chinese hard technology companies are shifting from the "technology application market" to the "industrial innovation and technological innovation market." The focus of future competition is not who has a bigger model, but who can connect AI with robots, automated equipment, experimental processes and industrial scenarios, so that AI can truly participate in scientific discovery and industrial innovation.
But Huang Yuqing also pointed out a problem: At present, there are not enough high-value industrial scenarios that private technology innovation companies can touch.
"Not every project is bound to succeed, but without such attempts, good results will not come out." Innovation in hard technology requires an environment that "allows trial and error and tolerates failure." This environment not only relies on capital to build, but also requires the industry to provide more real scenarios and room for trial and error.
In the past ten years, Huang Yuqing has gone through directional errors, broken capital chains, and industry ridicule. Huang Yuqing admitted that "I had a lot of self-doubt for a long time." But Magga survived. Huang Yuqing’s answer is simple: “As long as you keep going in the right direction, you will definitely get very good rewards.”
Huang Yuqing is 41 years old this year. He said that he can still fight for another 40 years. He has a bold prediction: Cancer will become a chronic disease, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be an incurable disease. The path to realization is to achieve an order-of-magnitude jump in the efficiency of new drug research and development, and Magega Kunpeng Laboratory has "just taken the first step."
This may be the true meaning of "no Plan B" - not leaving no escape route for yourself, but believing that the only road is worth going on. In the long process of China's hard science and technology from catching up to leading, this belief is the key to overcoming difficulties. (over)
