By Kate Yuan

EDA veteran Li Yanfeng started a new business again: Beijing Zhengyan Software (峥研软件), a platform of promoting efficiency and collaboration for engineering researchers, JW Insights reported on November 18.

Source: Internet

The company has attracted many institutional investors headed by ByteDance, Zhu Yiming (CXMT CEO), Source Code Capital, SEE Fund, ShuiMu Tsinghua Alumni Capital and GSR Capital, according to Tianyancha, a provider of Chinese corporation data and due diligence platform.

Li Yanfeng is a successful Chinese serial entrepreneur in the EDA field. In 2012, Li founded PDA (博达微科技), which was acquired by leading Chinese EDA company Primarius (概伦电子) in 2019. Li then served as the chief product officer and executive vice president of Primarius. At the end of 2021, Primarius became the first listed EDA company in China. In May 2022, he left the company.

Prior to these ventures, Li also worked as the R&D vice president and general manager of Chinese EDA startup Accelicon (艾克赛利). The firm was bought by Agilent (安捷伦) in 2012 and became the first Chinese EDA company to go through a process of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

The Accelicon and PDA cases were the rare large-scale acquisitions before 2020 in China. Although Chinese EDA companies have begun to go public with M&A deals in recent years, it was uncommon before 2020.