Speech by the Chief Executive Officer at the 2nd International Bio-Computing Innovation Summit (29 September 2025)

Financial Secretary, Wei, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning.  It is my great pleasure to join you all today at the 2nd International Bio-Computing Innovation Summit organised by BioMap.  This event is very dear to our heart as it represents one of the many ongoing deliverables by BioMap since the establishment of the investment partnership between the HKIC and BioMap in 2024.

Supporting Investee Companies to Grow “From One to Infinity”

At last year’s inaugural International Bio-Computing Innovation Summit, where the investment partnership between the HKIC and BioMap was announced and when Hong Kong InnoHub was established, we said, among other things, that the HKIC keenly looked forward to this collaboration which would be one of the stories showing our vision to support our investee companies and partners to go “From One to Infinity”, beyond their initial journey “From Zero to One”.

What we meant was that we knew that a lot of promising innovations and entrepreneurships i.e. “From Zero to One” were already happening in Hong Kong, thanks to the great attributes of Hong Kong such as “One Country Two Systems”, being part of the Greater Bay Area, rule of law, free flow of capital, data and talents, as well as fast-growing innovation and technology ecosystem guided by the HKSAR Government.  With such favourable backdrop, we believed that the HKIC could best play our role as a facilitator or accelerator to support companies and partners in the HKIC ecosystem to go “From One to Infinity”.  In fact, our ongoing exchange with entrepreneurs and companies often showed that as they continued to scale up and develop, they needed support beyond “From Zero to One” but in areas such as application, commercialisation, market expansion, fund raising, corporate governance and talents retention, to name but a few.

This is exactly where the HKIC comes in, and why we are very focused on our “Investment +” playbook.  As the Patient Capital institution wholly owned by and representing the HKSAR Government, our “Investment +” approach means that we seek financial return with an investment standard and execution model on a par with professional investors, while contributing to the economy and society of Hong Kong at the same time.  

From the perspective of our investee companies and partners, “Investment +” has one more dimension of meaning.  It also means that the HKIC brings to them more than typical investment capital.  In addition to our own capital, we facilitate inflow of capital from other international, institutional and long-term investors to Hong Kong, and via Hong Kong to Chinese Mainland, as well as to our investee companies and partners.  So far, every Hong Kong dollar invested by the HKIC has attracted over five Hong Kong dollars from long-term capital in the market.  Apart from capital, we bring in other resources such as local and international connections across different spheres of the ecosystem, covering sectors such as investment, industry, academia, research and government.

By the aforesaid approach, we hope to accelerate the path to success of the companies and partners in the HKIC ecosystem, which will in turn contribute to the long-term economic growth of Hong Kong.  As of today, we have invested in over 130 projects, of which two companies are already listed in Hong Kong with promising performance.  In addition, more than 10 companies have either submitted or planned to submit their applications for listing in Hong Kong this year.  Among these companies and before listing, 5 are already unicorns.  

Guiding Investee Companies to Contribute to Other Sectors and Hong Kong

What I said just now was only part of the HKIC story so far.  “From One to Infinity” is more than the roadmap of innovation and commercialisation of our investee companies and partners.  It is also the roadmap describing the breadth and depth of our partnerships with different companies.  The case of BioMap is a vivid example.

Thanks to the support of Baidu and great leadership of Wei, BioMap possesses differentiating vision and niche, which compare not only favourably in the region but also globally.  For example, BioMap’s xTrimo model was the first life science AI foundation model to hit 210+ billion parameters, demonstrating an effective integration of AI and life sciences.  BioMap has been bringing local and global impacts because its technological achievement has made biological research and discovery dramatically faster and easier, creating new frontiers of growth, and reshaping the market and industry.  

And when we said the partnership between the HKIC and BioMap had gone “From One to Infinity”, we meant that the beauty of this partnership is not only about BioMap’s own success.  On the basis of such success, and coupled with other innovations and companies incubated by the partnership, we built a platform with Chinese wisdom and HK DNA to contribute to the success of other enterprises and sectors, hence bringing benefits to Hong Kong’s long-term competitiveness. 

For example, Hong Kong InnoHub was set up during last year’s Summit.  Since establishment, it has been generating good momentum of growth in areas leveraging the macro trend of AI integration in biotech in Hong Kong.  Today, some of the initiatives that we are going to witness include the co-founding of BioGend which is an AI-powered antibody discovery company focused on precision immune modulation with a clear mission to develop first-in-class pipelines for autoimmune diseases.  In addition, we will also have the release of the world’s first multimodal Breast-Cancer Tumor-Cell Foundation Model.

We assure you that all these promising developments only offer a few glimpses of many ongoing efforts of the partnership between the HKIC and BioMap.  We will keep up the momentum, and create more great stories for Hong Kong.  

Closing

To close, let me say thank you again to BioMap for your strong commitment to Hong Kong.  The story started with the investment partnership between the HKIC and BioMap last year, together with the organisation of the inaugural Summit and formation of Hong Kong InnoHub at the same time.  From then to now, a lot has happened including the 2nd edition of the Summit today, and other efforts such as the ongoing co-creation of five local start-ups with other partners, formalisation of collaboration with various Hong Kong universities, and arrangement of more than 70 students to train their own protein language models.  These are ground-breaking and amazing developments, and please keep up the good work for Hong Kong.  We at the HKIC keenly look forward to working closely with BioMap on multiple fronts to bring benefits to Hong Kong’s economy and society. 

Last but not least, thank you once again for having me today.  I hope you all enjoy the Summit!