The company behind Kujiale, a tool you may have used for home renovation, is going public.

In 2011, Huang Xiaohuang, who had just returned from Silicon Valley in the United States, accompanied a friend through Hangzhou's renovation markets. He witnessed firsthand how designers pulled all-nighters to revise a single rendering, how homeowners struggled to visualize their future homes from floor plans, and how even minor changes—like switching a sofa or wall color—required hours of rendering time, leading to frustration for all involved.

This industry pain point, which has plagued countless renovators, inspired Huang and his two classmates, Chen Hang and Zhu Hao, to focus their entrepreneurial efforts on this area. The trio, all top students with deep expertise in GPU high-performance computing from NVIDIA and Microsoft, abandoned their million-dollar Silicon Valley salaries to start a tech-driven transformation of the industry from a rented attic in Hangzhou.

Fourteen years later, in March 2026, Qunhe Technology, the company they founded, successfully passed the Hong Kong Stock Exchange hearing. It is set to become the first among the highly anticipated 'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons' to complete an IPO, earning the title of the 'world's first spatial intelligence stock.'

The product they refined in that attic is now Kujiale, a tool known and used by nearly every renovator today.

A decade ago, there were few options for previewing a renovated home. Designers from renovation companies would use 3dsMax or CAD to create drawings, spending a day or more rendering a few images. Any minor revision required another lengthy wait. Alternatively, homeowners could only imagine the outcome from floor plans, often leading to costly post-renovation surprises.

When Kujiale emerged, its most compelling feature was lowering the industry's long-standing barriers.

Behind this breakthrough was the founders' precise technological insight. While working on CUDA development at NVIDIA, Huang recognized the potential of GPU multi-core parallel architecture. Instead of following the traditional path of local software deployment, they placed the most compute-intensive rendering tasks in the cloud, building a dedicated GPU cluster with low-cost graphics cards to significantly reduce computing costs.

The result for users was revolutionary: no need to install multi-gigabyte clients or master complex professional operations. By simply opening a browser, dragging and dropping pre-made furniture models, users could generate fully rendered, light-and-shadow-enhanced full-house designs in minutes.

Since its establishment in 2011, Qunhe Technology has traversed 14 years, with Kujiale becoming a leading player in China's home design software market.

However, for Qunhe Technology, now preparing to enter the capital market, the first half of the home furnishing SaaS journey is over. At this dual juncture of industry cycles and technological transformation, the founders have knocked on the IPO door, aiming to position the company as an infrastructure provider for the spatial intelligence era.

In this next phase, it faces a broader and more challenging market. Yet, the opportunities are equally vast, spanning trillion-dollar markets from home furnishing to embodied intelligence, suggesting Qunhe's potential is about to be fully unlocked.

01

From Attic Startup to Hangzhou's Six Little Dragons: A Long-Term Vision of Three Technologists

The term 'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons' first gained traction around the 2025 Spring Festival, referring to six companies—DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics, Game Science, DeepRobotics, BrainCo, and Qunhe Technology—spanning cutting-edge fields like large models, humanoid robots, AAA gaming, brain-computer interfaces, and spatial intelligence. They are seen as the new vanguard of Hangzhou's digital economy.

As of now, aside from Qunhe Technology, Unitree Robotics' Sci-Tech innovation board (Science and Technology Innovation Board) IPO application has been accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, DeepRobotics has initiated Listing guidance (pre-IPO coaching), while the other three remain in private financing stages. Qunhe's early listing makes it the first complete case study for observing the growth trajectory of Hangzhou's hard tech companies.

Looking back, Qunhe's growth in its first phase hinged on two critical nodes and two core strategic decisions.

In the traditional home furnishing industry, design has long been a bottleneck. Professional design software was complex and costly, with designers needing days to complete a full-house design. More problematic was the disconnect between design drawings and factory production, often resulting in unmanufacturable 'beautiful designs,' high rework rates, long delivery times, and poor industry collaboration. For small-to-medium home furnishing enterprises and dealers, the high design costs and labor investments were insurmountable.

In 2013, Qunhe Technology launched its core product, Kujiale, entering the market with a cloud-native 3D design tool. Its 'drag-and-drop operation, real-time rendering, and quick visualization' experience dramatically lowered the professional threshold for home design.

Unlike traditional software requiring local deployment and high-end hardware, Kujiale placed rendering tasks in the cloud, enabling design operations via browsers while facilitating real-time design sharing and collaboration. Tasks that once took days were compressed into tens of minutes.

This innovation directly addressed the industry's most pressing pain point, enabling rapid market penetration. From renovation companies and home dealers to leading custom home firms and independent designers, all became Kujiale users.

In 2015, the founding team made a pivotal decision: adopting a subscription model as the core business strategy. Their product portfolio expanded from individual design tools to enterprise-oriented SaaS subscriptions, forming a complete ecosystem serving both individual users and businesses.

Prospectus data shows Qunhe's revenue grew from RMB 664 million in 2023 to RMB 820 million in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of ~11.2%. Gross margins climbed steadily from ~75% to over 80%, a strong figure in the SaaS sector.

Subscription revenue dominated, accounting for nearly 97% of total revenue in 2025, with enterprise clients contributing over 80%. By late 2025, Qunhe served over 47,000 enterprise clients, including over 400 major clients, maintaining a major client retention rate above 96.5% for three consecutive years (reaching 98.7% in 2025) and a net revenue retention rate of 109%.

This means leading home furnishing firms not only continued using Qunhe's products but increased their spending. Long-term clients like Kuka Home, Sofia, and Gold Mantis became steady partners. This high stickiness stemmed not from marketing or pricing but from the product's ability to solve real problems and deliver tangible value.

More crucially, Qunhe accumulated valuable data assets.

By late 2025, Qunhe's platform housed 479 million 3D models with real physical parameters and over 500 million structured spatial scenes covering floor plans, furniture, and building materials—forming China's largest home 3D database.

This data not only optimizes product experiences and trains AI capabilities but also serves as a core barrier (moat) for expanding into new businesses.

Many attribute Qunhe's status as the first among the Six Little Dragons to list to its early commercialization and clear profit model. Indeed, in 2025, Qunhe achieved profitability, a rarity among cash-burning hard tech startups.

But the fundamental reason is its 14-year effort to build deep moats in product, client, and data within a sufficiently deep vertical sector, creating a complete path of 'technological pain point resolution → commercial validation → sustained moat accumulation.'

02

Industry Shift: Pressing the Transformation Button Five Years Early

To some extent, Qunhe's first-phase growth was deeply tied to China's real estate boom.

The surge in new home deliveries drove massive renovation demand, expanding the home furnishing industry and fueling front-end design tool markets. However, as the property market entered a deep adjustment phase, the home furnishing industry's underlying logic fundamentally changed, marking the end of the first phase of digitalization.

In terms of market size, China's home furnishing market reached RMB 4.8 trillion in 2025, maintaining steady growth but with entirely new drivers. National Bureau of Statistics data shows fluctuating new home deliveries in recent years, while renovation demand for existing homes rapidly increased, exceeding 70% in some first-tier cities. The industry has shifted from a 'new home-driven' incremental market to a ' Revitalization of existing stock ' (stock renewal) stock market (stock market).

This transformation directly altered the industry's demand structure.

During the new home era, the focus was on standardized, scalable rapid delivery, with design tools valued for efficiency and accessibility. In the existing-home era, user demands became more personalized and fragmented, raising expectations for quality, detail, and end-to-end experience.

This means digitalization must extend beyond front-end design to encompass production, supply chain, construction, and retail.

Meanwhile, the home furnishing industry's digital penetration remains low. Agencies report it below 20% in 2025, far below retail averages. Most small-to-medium firms still rely on traditional production methods, with design-production disconnects causing high material waste, low efficiency, and long delivery times.

Integrated front-to-back-end operations have become core to digital transformation and a new competitive focus in home furnishing SaaS.

Another transformative force is the explosive growth of AI. From AI-generated designs and intelligent order splitting to AI-optimized production scheduling and supply chain management, virtual studio shoots, and digital twins, AI is permeating every home furnishing link.

Here, Qunhe's accumulated 3D spatial data and understanding align perfectly with embodied intelligence development needs.

Data shows China's embodied intelligence market reached ~RMB 915 billion in 2025, growing 20.4% YoY, and is expected to exceed RMB 1 trillion in 2026. Training embodied intelligence requires massive 3D spatial data with accurate physical parameters and simulation environments—opening a vast new market for Qunhe.

Industry cycle shifts and technological revolutions have fundamentally altered competition in home furnishing SaaS. The first phase focused on tool functionality, usability, and market penetration; the next will center on end-to-end solutions, deep industry penetration, cross-scenario expansion, and foundational technological capabilities.

For Qunhe, listing is not an endpoint but a new starting point.

Huang Xiaohuang once described Qunhe's journey as 'using a hammer to find nails': in the first phase, they used GPU computing power to secure the home furnishing 'nail.' Now, they aim to extend their 14 years of accumulated capabilities to broader markets, becoming an infrastructure provider for the spatial intelligence era.

03

Next-Phase Strategy: Three Nails Targeting Trillion-Dollar Markets

Prospectus disclosures reveal Qunhe's expansion from home design into e-commerce, industrial digital twins, embodied intelligence training, and film/TV content creation, with the core goal of evolving from a vertical SaaS provider to a foundational spatial intelligence infrastructure company.

In home furnishing, Qunhe's focus is on integrated front-to-back-end operations and full-link digitalization from design to production.

For example, addressing custom home firms' pain points, it launched an integrated design-production solution, enabling seamless dock (docking) between design drawings and production systems. Designs can instantly generate production orders for factory equipment, resolving the long-standing design-production disconnect. This solution has been implemented at multiple leading custom home firms.

Full AI integration is another core driver of home furnishing growth. Since 2024, Qunhe has iterated its AI product matrix, launching an AI-powered design platform that generates full-house designs in five minutes. For retail terminals, its AI tools help dealers quickly create designs.

Beyond its core business, Qunhe is exploring new scenarios for a second growth curve. Huang Xiaohuang publicly outlined Qunhe's 'Three Nails' theory: beyond home furnishing, the second nail is 3D digital content creation, and the third is intelligent device training.

Consider its embodied intelligence layout (layout). Leveraging massive 3D spatial data and spatial cognition tech, Qunhe launched SpatialVerse, a next-gen spatial intelligence solution providing precise 3D synthetic virtual datasets for embodied intelligence firms, enabling training in simulated environments.

The platform has partnered with leading embodied intelligence firms like ZhiYuan Robotics, Yinhe General, and Qiongche Intelligence, becoming a core player in China's embodied intelligence training data sector.

However, both home furnishing deepening and spatial intelligence expansion face intensifying competition and uncertainties.

For instance, Alibaba's Tmall Home Improvement announced a 2026 strategy focusing on 'light customization' trends, upgrading service infrastructure while integrating QianWen large model into home improvement for AI design, marketing, and supply chain management. Leveraging platform traffic and merchant resources, it rapidly penetrates the home digitalization market.

JD's home improvement layout (strategy) is more aggressive. Last year, it acquired national direct-operation renovation leader LifeHome, completing a closed loop from design, material selection, construction, to after-sales. It then launched a new strategy powered by JoyAI large model, introducing an AI construction site supervision system and committing to zero hidden costs in a self-operated model, targeting RMB 30 billion in GMV within three years to become China's largest home improvement platform.

Even property giant Beike, leveraging second-hand house (second-hand housing) transaction traffic, generated RMB 15.4 billion in home furnishing revenue in 2025, maintaining rapid growth. Its HomeSaaS platform, developed with ~RMB 400 million in annual R&D investment, integrates data across customer acquisition, design, contracting, construction, and after-sales.

Data shows Qunhe's 2025 revenue grew 8.6% YoY, a slowdown from previous rates. This reflects uncertainty in the home industry's recovery and cautious digital investment from enterprise clients.

On the other hand, after more than a decade of development, the penetration rate of home design software among leading enterprises has already reached a relatively high level. Future growth will require reaching out to small and medium-sized customers, whose willingness and ability to pay are relatively low, which may affect the company's profitability.

Returning to the initial topic, as the first among Hangzhou's "Six Little Dragons" to enter the capital market, Qunhe's IPO is not only a significant milestone in its own development but also provides a reference model for China's hard technology startups.

Over the past decade, Qunhe has used a design tool to reshape the design process in China's home furnishing industry, helping the sector improve efficiency while also achieving its own commercial success, becoming a benchmark enterprise in the vertical industry SaaS sector.

The capital support brought by the listing will provide ample resources for its technological R&D, market expansion, and ecosystem construction. However, what the capital market ultimately values is whether a company can continuously create value and translate its technological advantages into sustained revenue and profit growth.

In the second half of its journey, Qunhe's core challenge is to prove that it can not only excel in creating a tool for a specific vertical market but also transform its more than a decade of accumulated spatial data and technological capabilities into cross-scenario foundational infrastructure, establishing new competitive barriers in the emerging field of spatial intelligence.

This article is an original piece from Xinmou.

— END —