A decade spent selling AI software has been almost entirely unwound at DataCanvas, and the Beijing company is now asking Hong Kong’s public market to buy the replacement business.
Three years ago the foundational software line carried 76.5% of what the company sold. During the first half of 2026 that share shrank to 0.1%. The collapse was absolute as well as relative: RMB81.3M in 2023 fell below RMB500,000 for the six months. Over the same stretch, total annual revenue rose from RMB106.2M in 2023 to RMB1.10B in 2025, compounding at 221.5% a year.
Early in 2023 the company redirected money into computing infrastructure, and cloud services followed. What emerged was less a tools vendor than an assembler of compute clusters that resells access to the capacity.
Where the software years went
DataCanvas dates to 2013 and trades in China under the name Jiuzhang Yunji. Modelling tools for visual work shipped a year later, and later releases spread across the deployment and development stages. The gap those products filled was real, because holding data never guaranteed a usable model, and a model that worked never guaranteed one that could run in daily operations.
Demand proved harder to read than code. Fang Lei, now chairman, has described a founding team that concentrated on engineering and expected the market to follow.
The listing application carries a September 29 date. Public investors are effectively being asked to value a compute reseller that still wears a software company’s history; the growth is genuine, though the gross margins are unlikely to resemble anything a 2023 enterprise pitch would have offered.
