EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a top candidate to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on the presidential ticket, is minimizing the role that Chinese investing played in a high-altitude surveillance company that the former astronaut co-founded.

Tucson-based World View, which was created in 2012 and contracts with the federal government and private companies, received an unknown amount of funding in the years that followed from Chinese tech giant Tencent in at least two rounds of venture capital funding.