Sonny Wu has a mission. He wants to find the top tech entrepreneurs in the country and back them. The managing director of GSR Ventures is sitting in his office, wearing a shirt with no tie and his hair not particularly combed down: He looks less like a traditional Chinese businessman, and more like a new-age financier. Wu is one of a new breed of investors capitalizing on China's rising technology sector.

Asked to name one startup technology project in China that he finds exciting at the moment, Wu pauses for half a second, then points his thumb at the wall behind him and casually says, "The guy next door."

And he literally means "the guy next door."

A rising breed

There is a new breed of savvy investors, specializing in the tech sector, who are scouting around China for a technology guru with the next great innovation. If all goes according to plan, they will turn that innovation into a successful company.

Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race, has spent years covering the rise of China's tech sector, especially people who have combined technological innovation with entrepreneurial nous to create a successful business venture.

"Don't be surprised if the next Steve Jobs comes from China," she writes, referring to the famous co-founder of Apple. Fannin says that not only are China's innovation gurus closing the technological gap with the United States, but they are also discovering how to make a buck out of it.

"The 'in' thing among bright, young Chinese techies is to do a startup, get financing, scale it to sizeable revenues and profits, and then go public," she writes.

Examples of Chinese tech gurus who have made it big as entrepreneurs include: Robil Li, founder of Baidu, Charles Wang and Tiger Wu, the gifted engineers who started up PingCom, a company that created its own technology to provide free messaging on mobile phones, and Jeff Chen, the software developer who designed the revolutionary and highly successful Maxthon Internet browser.

The list goes on, and these dedicated technologists all had one thing in common. They came up with a cutting-edge innovation, then sought out and found the investors needed to turn their ideas into companies.

Sonny Wu believes the Chinese tech-investment phenomenon can be traced back to 2002, when China had a surge of technology companies making their IPO on the NASDAQ. 

He told ChinAfrica the money is coming in because there's a market and this factor is being boosted by the encouragement of innovation in institutions of higher learning.