Delin Capital’s 2026 AI Startup Competition, the Delin Cup, leads with the rewards on the table. The champion takes RMB 2 million in cash, unconditional and equity-free, far above the RMB 300,000 to RMB 600,000 typical of domestic AI contests.
Up to 15 teams across tracks enter the roughly 4000-square-metre Delin Residency for ten weeks of deep incubation. During the stay, office, housing, meals, computing, hardware lab and industry resources are all free, so teams start working on arrival. Each resident team can draw up to RMB 5 million in equity investment.
The tenth-week finale is Demo Day, where more than 30 top venture firms hear the 15 teams pitch. The residency is deliberately designed as a space for flow, removing the friction of rent, kit and compute so founders spend time on the product.
Delin sets three tests for entrants. First, solve a real scenario rather than chase an abstract trend, because only a concrete problem turns an AI feature into something users pay for repeatedly. Second, ship a real product, not a concept, which is why a minimum viable product or demonstrable demo is required to surface problems a pitch deck hides. Third, hold the ability to iterate fast and keep the core, intelligence-bearing modules under autonomous control, so a base-model upgrade cannot erase the moat.
The contest is less a publicity exercise than a structured pipeline: free runway plus a forced shipping cadence plus a captive cap table. By concentrating scarce, well-fed founder time, Delin is betting it can manufacture funded, demonstrable startups faster than an open call for pitches ever could.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Leiphone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.
Translated and adapted from Leiphone (https://www.leiphone.com/latest/index/id/4765).