China-based Tuya, which provides a service for businesses to deploy and manage IoT devices, raised $915M in a US IPO
Context & Ripple Effects
Tuya's IPO closes a three-year arc from private backing to public markets: the IoT-platform company raised a $200M Series C in 2018 from Australia's Future Fund and NEA, and now converts that into a $14B market value after a first-day pop of 19% on $915M raised. It also lands in a crowded lane — fellow Chinese IoT player Terminus Technologies had already raised ~$173M to deploy solutions across 70 cities.
The listing venue is the notable part when read against later coverage: while Tuya went to US exchanges in 2021, Unitree Robotics five years later priced a Shanghai IPO targeting roughly $904M — a shift in where Chinese hard-tech companies raise their scale capital.
First-order effects
- Tuya banks $915M of primary currency and a $14B market value, giving its IoT deployment-and-management platform public-market funding ahead of private rivals like Terminus.
- Early backers Future Fund and NEA see their 2018 Series C stakes marked publicly for the first time, with day-one trading already up 19%.
Second-order effects
- Competing Chinese IoT solution providers now face a listed rival with acquisition currency and disclosed financials, pressuring them toward their own fundraises or consolidation.
- US institutional appetite for China-based device platforms is validated by the pop, encouraging other China-founded hardware-software companies to test New York listings.
Third-order effects
- If the later Unitree path holds — pricing a Shanghai IPO rather than a US one — the Tuya-era pattern of Chinese hard-tech raising at scale on US exchanges gives way to a split by listing venue, shaped by geopolitics and domestic capital pools.
The trend: Chinese hardware-adjacent platform companies are graduating from large private rounds to public listings, with the preferred venue migrating from US exchanges toward Shanghai as the decade progresses.