Manycore Tech, a design software developer hailed as one of Hangzhou’s “Six Little Dragons”, made its trading debut in Hong Kong on Friday, with shares rising 172 per cent at the open, as the company positions itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the physical world.

The stock opened at HK$20.70, surging 172 per cent from its HK$7.62 offer price before ending the day at HK$18.60, up 144 per cent. The firm raised HK$1.09 billion (US$160 million) from its initial public offering (IPO). On the grey market on Thursday, the shares surged 169 per cent to HK$20.52 on Futu Securities, a major brokerage platform in the city, after the retail tranche was oversubscribed around 1,590 times during the share sale period.

Manycore sought to frame its next phase of growth around what it called “spatial intelligence”, saying that advances in AI were increasingly moving beyond language into real-world environments – a shift it considered as central to the path towards artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“Spatial intelligence is not an industry – it is a foundational capability that can be applied to different scenarios,” said Huang Xiaohuang, Manycore’s chairman and co-founder, in an interview with the South China Morning Post ahead of the listing.

Founded in 2011, Manycore built its initial foothold with its space design software Kujiale and its overseas version Coohom. The platforms enable real-time rendering and visualisation, while also converting detailed design specifications into production-ready instructions and Building Information Modelling-based deliverables for manufacturers.

Riding the wave of advances in AI, the company has in recent years pivoted towards spatial intelligence, rolling out a suite of new products. These include SpatialVerse, a platform for generating highly realistic and physically accurate synthetic data sets; SpatialTwin, an industrial digital twin platform; SpatialLM and SpatialGen, its spatial language and generative models; and LuxReal, a 3D content creation tool.