BioMap is the AI biology company Liu Wei co-founded with Baidu founder Robin Li in 2020. On November 6, Liu told a Hong Kong summit that the city is its preferred listing venue, according to The Standard. In an interview the Economic Observer, a Beijing business weekly, published on October 21, he explained why BioMap builds no drug pipeline of its own. “They make drugs and earn big money,” he said of pipeline companies. “We provide tools and earn relatively smaller money, but we can serve more customers.”
BioMap’s deal documents show how a tool provider can be paid for drug progress. In June, Harbour BioMed, a Hong Kong-listed antibody developer, announced that it and BioMap would jointly set up MegaStream TechBio, a new AI drug company. Harbour’s exchange filing says the founders expect potential upfront payments, success-based milestones and royalties, “in accordance with industry practice.” It does not disclose the milestone triggers or any amounts.
Three of China’s internet groups show three different ways to house AI drug discovery. ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, spun its team out this year as Anew Labs. Robin Li and Liu set up BioMap in 2020 as an independent company. Tencent, the owner of WeChat, kept its iDrug platform in-house. Chinese coverage has read the split through research cycles. STAR Market Daily, a Shanghai financial outlet, argued in June that drug research runs on a timescale of years, far slower than internet product cycles. 36Kr, a Chinese tech outlet, compared the paths of five internet groups in a June article published in English.
Only one of the three, BioMap, has disclosed deal terms. Its Sanofi agreement puts most of its value in payments tied to drug progress. In one analyst’s count of this year’s billion-dollar AI drug deals, most announced value also depends on future research, regulatory or sales goals. In my view, the platform label describes where BioMap sits in the drug chain. The payment terms say what it gets paid for. What each parent still holds is mostly undisclosed. I expect BioMap’s choice of Hong Kong listing chapter to set how much of this it must explain.
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Three Distances from the Parent
Each structure can be read along three lines: who owns the weights and IP, whose cloud the work runs on, and how much the parent still holds. No company fills all three lines in public.
In September, Reuters reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter, that Anew had raised $290m at a $1.5bn valuation and that ByteDance will keep 56%. No company document confirms the stake. Screenshots from Tianyancha, a Chinese company-records database, posted on Eastmoney’s Caifuhao finance channel, show Anew’s Shanghai operating company as 100% owned by ByteDance’s Singapore entity. Where outside investors, including the state-backed Shanghai Future Industries Fund, hold their shares is not public.
Model and IP ownership is less clear. Protenix, a biomolecular structure model built by the ByteDance team that became Anew, still sits on GitHub under the ByteDance account. Its README puts the code under the Apache 2.0 licence. It calls the weights of Protenix-v2, released in April, “proprietary and confidential information of the rights holder,” and does not name the holder. On drug IP, an IL-17 inhibitor patent application filed in December 2025 names Anew Therapeutics Pte Ltd, a Singapore-registered entity, as applicant. That is six months before the June 2026 spin-out reports. On cloud, the same 36Kr article reported that Anew would keep using Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud arm.
Kuaishou, ByteDance’s main short-video rival, carved out its video model Kling in a deal I analysed in July. It came with parent control, consolidation, an IPO deadline and investor buyback rights. For Anew, only the first, parent control, is on record, and only through an anonymous source.
For BioMap, registry records compiled by VBData, a Chinese healthcare data service, show that a Baidu subsidiary held 40% of its Beijing operating company in 2021. That was the largest direct stake. Liu held about 22%. A 2023 Economic Observer report, citing registry data, named Liu as the controlling person. By September 2025, Li, Liu and the Baidu-linked holders left the register. A new holding company now owns 100%, and the ownership above it is not public. A Baidu white paper says Baidu AI Cloud co-built a supercomputer cluster with BioMap. BioMap’s website now describes multi-cloud deployment.
Tencent’s iDrug fills the cloud line most clearly: its product page says it runs on Tencent Cloud. On IP, a drug patent published in February names Tencent’s Shenzhen technology arm as applicant. Outside capital does not settle the parent question either. Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs raised $600m in 2025 and $2.1bn in May. The UK’s Companies House still lists Alphabet as holding more than 75% of its shares and votes.
The paid section reads BioMap’s two deal documents line by line and sets them against the upfront share in this year’s billion-dollar AI drug deals. It then compares the rule text of Hong Kong’s two specialist listing chapters, including a July change.
What follows is a two-step test for telling a pipeline-priced contract from a platform fee, what each Hong Kong listing route would make BioMap disclose, and the revenue split that would change my view. Only need this article? Buy the full article as a PDF for $5. No subscription needed.