Introducing Tsingyuan Ventures to the world… who are we, and what do we believe?
First things first… a lot of people have never heard of Tsingyuan Ventures, so we probably need to introduce ourselves a bit.
We grew out of TEEC Angel Fund, a series of funds raised and administered by the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club (an invite-only group of graduates from Beijing’s Tsinghua University — the top engineering school in China — who have achieved success as business leaders).
TEEC Angel Fund has had several strong resources that were put to good use: for one thing, all of the investment professionals have deep technical knowledge (all are PhDs, and all have had significant experience working as engineering leadership at top tech companies). For another, the global Chinese entrepreneurial diaspora is formidable and well-networked. There are bonds of trust that are formed by these high performing individuals who share common school ties or backgrounds.
The approach netted some huge successes. TEEC Angel Fund participated in the seed rounds of Quanergy (LiDAR innovator: last round valued at $1.6B) and Zoom (Video Conferencing innovator; last round valued at $1B). In both cases, there was a decent technical understanding of the technological innovation, and a personal connection through the TEEC network. TEEC also participated in the seed round of a 3rd Unicorn, Ginkgo Bioworks, which falls outside of the core “China + US” focus, but which fits squarely in our love of cross-disciplinary ventures.*
After the first 3 TEEC Angel Funds, a subset of the partners from TEEC Angel Fund started “Tsingyuan Ventures”. The rebranding helps underscore the evolution from a group of Angels to a dedicated group of professionals, with the financial resources to follow on (at least through Series A). We have also expanded our partnership pool beyond just Tsinghua graduates, although the connection to Tsinghua lives on in both our name and our fund (8 of our 9 partners are still Tsinghua grads, and we maintain a very close relationship with the university).
The formation of a new fund — along with the building of a new brand — is a good opportunity to take the time to consider the question of “what do we believe”. For us, the foundational belief is that bringing together China + the US is special. As a secondary belief, we believe that there is tremendous value in early stage ventures that cross scientific disciplines (eg., life sciences + computer science). Putting the two concepts together, we like crossing borders and disciplines at an early stage.
This post has already gone on for a while, so I’m going to use a second post to dive into what this means (update… just wrote it :).
*as a side note, writing 3 seed stage checks into future unicorns is extremely rare. I’m going to explore how this happened in a future blog post (whoa… my first blog post, and I’ve already committed to at least 2 more blog posts… is this the way that this goes? ;)
