Judges

Mr. Ravi Belani is a Co-Founder of Alchemist Accelerator and serves as its Managing Partner, Managing Director and Partner. Mr. Belani serves as an Advisor of MightyHive. He teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University. He served as an Associate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson until 2010. He has experiences with New Ventures and Established Firms. He served in product management with Zaplet. As a Management Consultant of McKinsey, he served with Fortune 500 hi tech and biotech companies on a range of strategic issues, including market attractiveness assessments, pricing, channel strategy, and new product development processes. He serves as a Director of AdaptiveAds, Inc. He serves as Director of Personiva, Inc. He served as a Director of Redux, Inc. He served as Director at Vizu Corporation. As a Board Fellow of Harvard, Mr. Belani served the Global Board of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). He also served in product management with Extensity as a Mayfield Fellow.

Shinzo Nakano is President & CEO of Itochu Technology Ventures, Inc.(ITV). ITV is a venture capital arm of Itochu Corporation, one of the largest trading conglomerates in Japan. He joined Itochu Corporation in 1989 and since then he has been working in startup ecosystem both in US and Japan. He founded ITV in 2000 as a general partner and ITV runs its 5th fund now. He is Vice Chairman of Japan Venture Capital Association. He received BA in Law at Keio University.

I am a seasoned startup founder, investor and speaker, and spend my time creating, evangelizing and investing in the future of responsible AI and decentralization. A 19-year veteran of Silicon Valley, I have built deep-tech startups with multi-million-dollar revenue streams and focus on technology, startups and systems that have a positive impact on the humans they serve.
I am the co-founder & President of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, a network of some of the largest Investors, Thinkers, Practitioners and Creators, with Chapters around the globe – with a core mission to ‘Fund the Revolution’ and bring with it a thoughtful and responsible approach to the impact, value and culture in the Decentralized Ecosystem.

David Weng is recognized as a seasoned angel and venture investor with proven track record of bringing startups to successful IPOs, mergers and acquisitions. He focuses primarily on early-stage investments in Internet, enterprise software, wireless, cyber security, and rapidly-growing technology companies.
David was President of the Silicon Valley Taiwan Angels Group and on the board of the San Jose State University Tower Foundation as he received his M.S. in Computer Science Engineering from San Jose State University in 1983.

John M. Carson is a senior partner in the San Francisco and San Diego offices of Knobbe Martens. With 30 years of legal experience as a registered patent attorney, his practice involves representation of technology clients in the acquisition, protection and exploitation of IP rights, and particularly, patent portfolio development and management that maximizes value in complex IP environments. John also has extensive experience with the related needs of early stage companies as a founding advisor to one of the world’s first start-up accelerators, assisting with the commercialization of technology developed at research institutions, collaborating with founders, advisors and new management as a company scales or changes direction. John is an active advisor in a Silicon Valley accelerator and he is a successful investor in early stage VC funds and in companies as an angel investor.

A serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Arthur works as the Executive Director at BE Capital a healthcare focused investment firm, where he manages and invests a portfolio of medical technology ventures in the USA and Greater China.
BE Capital is a healthcare focused investment firm formed making investments into promising private and public hospital and healthcare technology ventures in the USA and Greater China.

Langley is Partner at Arm IoT Capital, a venture capital established by Arm Holdings, the world largest silicon IP company. With more than 10 years working with both corporate VC and independent VC, Langley works with global entrepreneurs to build up great companies with promising technologies shaping the next decade of the IoT world. Prior to Arm IoT Capital, Langley was with Trans-Pacific Technology Fund ,GRC Sinogreen Fund and also BASF Venture Capital.

Dr. Chen presently is the Deputy General Director of ITRI Commercialization & Industry Service Center (CIS) and is mainly responsible for helping ITRI and Taiwan new venture business. He also serves as many important roles:
 Managing Director of Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA)
 Deputy General Director of Asia Silicon Valley Development Agency (ASVDA)
 Deputy General Director of Taiwan Innovation Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC)
 Project Chief of Taiwan Innovation & Technology AreNa (TITAN)
 General Secretary of Taiwan ITRI New Venture Association (TINVA)
 Initiator of Taiwan ITRI Entrepreneur Investment Fund (TIEIF)
Dr. Chen has more than 25 years working experience in Taiwan and abroad. He successively worked for several well-known international enterprises such as being Board of Director (BOD) of Lippo Group / PT. FIRST MEDIA Tbk, Japan & Northeastern Asia Regional General Director of Green Packet Inc. /Berhad, Asian Pacific Sales Director of INTERSHOP Communications Ltd.

Edgar is experienced in running startups and mobile app businesses. He was previously the COO of Gogolook where he was responsible for developing global partnerships in Japan, Korea, the Middle East and Southeast Asia for the Whoscall app, a global caller ID service which accumulated more than 70 million downloads.

Mr. Harding is an investor and member of Life Science Angels and Band of Angels. He has expertise in early stage companies and associated governance; corporate and securities work and complex transactions. Mr. Harding was previously Founder and Deal Engineer at Deal Labs, and prior to that was General Counsel and Secretary at Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla Inc.) and worked at Tesla from 2006 to 2011. Mr. Harding was responsible for legal affairs at Tesla Motors, including corporate work, supplier agreements, and intellectual property. Mr. Harding has also served as General Counsel and Secretary at Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of IBM and Apple) and Actra (a joint venture of GE and Netscape). He has worked at Sun Microsystems as a staff attorney. In his spare time, he likes to run marathons and ultramarathons, and he is most proud of a 12:17 in the Miwok 100K. He has a J.D. from Vanderbilt Law School and an A.B. (math) from Duke University.

 Stephen joined as a managing director in DBS Bank (Taiwan) Ltd. In 2014.
 Stephen joined as a managing director in DBS’ Investment Banking Group in Singapore in June 2001. Prior to joining DBS, Stephen was the Head of Global Telecom, Media & Technology Group in Asia at JP Morgan Chase since 1998. He started his career with Chase in 1989 as a M&A generalist in New York before specialising in media and telecom sectors in New York and subsequently in Asia.
 In addition to his global coverage responsibility for the TMT Sector from 2001 to mid 2011, he was also Head of DBS Middle East in 2008-9 and Head of DBS Malaysia in 2010, before he became the CEO of DBS Asia Capital in mid-2011.
 He holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Iowa State University, a M.S. from M.I.T. and an MBA from the Wharton School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania.

Derrick Hsiang is an investor with over 10 years of experience focused on the consumer internet, SaaS and mobile applications space. While at WI Harper, Derrick focuses on sourcing, and portfolio company management. His investments include: Walla.by (Acquired by Bankrate), Knoala (Acquired), Qualaroo (Acquired by Scaleworks), Flutter (Acquired by Google), Threatwave (Acquired by Return Path), Avaamo, Epic!, Drop, The Sigma, Momentum Machines, nWay, Full Circle Insights, Coffee Meets Bagel, Kloudless, Xola, Synthego, Naadam, and others. In addition to investments, Derrick started WIH Innovations, a seed carve out, focused on investing in early stage tech startups in Silicon Valley.

Chia-Nan (Chester) Hsieh is currently a Senior Business Development Manager of AWS, responsible for Joint Innovation Center, Joint Incubator, Cloud Innovation School and AWS Educate program development in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Prior to AWS, Chester was a founding member and CEO of an IoT-focused startup company - EQL Technology. He was a Sales Director of Quanta Computer for nearly 10 years, and has worked for IT and telecom companies such as Inventec, Taiwan Mobile, TWNIC in both business and engineering roles. Chester started his career by founding two IT companies in mid-90s. He holds telecommunications engineering and computer science degrees from University of Maryland, College Park and University of York.

Hicham Jorio is the Managing Director in Spire Bioventure. He has 20 years of experience and responsibility developing channels and managing sales teams. Well versed with developing channel strategies, plans and executing them. He is a results oriented leader with strengths in: Creation of valuable expertise with channel models and routes to market across value added resellers, service providers, distributors and system integrators. He is also angel investors for several startups.

Graduated from National Tsinghua University with bachelor's degree in Power Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from George Washington University. With science and financial analysis background, and also is good at investing in IT, IoT field in startups and companies. SinoPac Venture Capital was established in January 2003. In recent years, we have focused investments in the ecommerce, FinTech, Industry 4.0, automation, cultural and creative industries, and biomedical industries. Concurrently, with greater cross-straits interaction, we also proactively seek cooperating partners in China to expand our scale.

Mike Lee is an entrepreneur-turned VC investor, engineer-turned business developer, and the author and columnist of industry trends. He now is an Investment Manager of WK Innovation. WKI is the first VC investor of DJI, the world’s leading drone company now valued at 15B USD. WKI’s strong portfolio companies and resourceful corporate partners in Greater China Region made WKI a reliable partner for enterprise growth.

Tony works for Advantech, an international IoT and intelligent system company, and is in charge of M&A, joint venture investment and business development between new IoT startups and Advantech business units. The past working experience of Tony includes equity research analyst, product manager of Advantech intelligent system group, and Advantech corporate investment.

Jeffrey Paine is a Co-founder and Managing Partner of Golden Gate Ventures, an early stage technology venture capital fund based in Singapore investing in Southeast Asia with over US$175 million under management investing in over 35 companies since 2012.

Jeff started and manages the Founder Institute in Singapore where he is currently overseeing its expansion in Southeast Asia, and Japan. Since 2010 the Founder Institute in Singapore has graduated over 100 companies. He is a recipient of the Founder Institute Director Award 2012 for “Greatest Ecosystem Impact” Worldwide (Singapore).

He is a Singapore native and graduated with a Bachelors of Business Administration (Information Systems) from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Aymerik is General Partner at Hardware Club, an early stage international venture capital fund. Aymerik has over 25 years of business development and VC experience across Western Digital Capital, SanDisk Ventures, Orange Ventures, and France Telecom Investments. His startups have had IPOs on Nasdaq and NYSE, with others acquired by Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Cox Automotive, Ericsson, Assa Abloy, and Cable & Wireless. Aymerik’s computing industry career began while at Carnegie Mellon University when he served as a Campus Representative for Apple Computer.

Pranesh Sinha leads Technology and Product Strategy initiatives at Qualcomm. Currently, he is driving Qualcomm's collaboration efforts in multiple countries by building innovation labs which benefit ecosystem partners. Pranesh has been at Qualcomm for more than 10 years in various roles including 3GPP standardization, technology strategy, and product development. Some of his key accomplishments include delivery of the world’s first HSPA+ and LTE products, establishing LTE-TDD as a global standard for unpaired spectrum, and delivering the first world-mode cellular modem including TD-SCDMA. For the past 3 years, Pranesh has also been leading Qualcomm’s start-up incubation efforts in India.

Pranesh has also worked in management and technical leadership roles at Intel, Texas Instruments, and Conexant. He is published in technical journals and holds multiple patents. He graduated from the National University of Singapore.

Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and the founding partner in two venture capital firm where he managed a pool of funds totaling up to 50million USD in which he is leading the firm’s investment and management team.
Andrew is also the Managing Partner and a financial-services investor at Tinkbig Venture and 3B Ventures. While at TinkBig Venture, he led investments in 36 startup deals with other co VC amounted a total of 20million USD committed fund. Prior to that, Andrew was a private-equity investor where he regularly advised his limited Partners on private-equity deals and fund formation. Before that he successfully listed his company at the MESDAQ Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur Securities Exchange and Hong Kong Growth Enterprise Market where he learned the intricacies of the stock market.
Andrew received his Master in Ecommerce from Queen Mary University London. Andrew has been featured various publication and newspapers as an outstanding entrepreneur.

Dr. Tsai started his professional career with Center for Aviation and Space Technology of Industrial Research Technology Institute (ITRI) in 1998, where he focused on product and technology development of global satellite navigation to be used in future civil aviation. Dr. Tsai then joined MediaTek Inc. (TWSE:2454) in 2000, working on mobile handset chipset for 2G/2.5G/2.75G wireless communication. In 2004, he led a team to develop Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver chipset, which was used in Garmin’s PND for vehicle navigation, and Garmin’s aviation, marine and hiking products. Later on, SONY DSC became the first in the industry to build in GPS within its digital camera products using MediaTek GPS IC. In 2000, Dr. Tsai also taught Automatic Control in Vehicle Engineering department of National Taipei Technology University.
Dr. Tsai's experience covered product development, management, planning and marketing in the IC design industry.

Renee Wang is a senior partner at PawVentures Group. Started by UC Berkeley alumni, PawVentures Group is a venture capital firm that supports forward-looking and innovative technology companies. Our team welcomes new disruptive ideas in many domains but currently focused on the following areas: Internet of Things, Augmented reality and virtual reality, Big Data Analysis, deep AI, and Health cares and innovation.

Allan joined Advantech in 2014 and leads CTO Office responsible for development of WISE-PaaS, an industrial IoT Data Platform aiming at extending Advantech’s world leading industrial computing platforms and embedded systems to data driven, cloud infrastructure neutral, and AI empowered cloud services for various verticals.
Allan earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1983, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1992. Before joining Advantech, Allan worked as CTO for 6 years and then as President for the latest 6 years at AVerMedia Technologies until 2013.

Jerry Yang is General Partner of Hardware Club, a Paris-based VC firm investing globally in early-stage full-stack startups. Before switching to the dark side, Jerry had been in analog IC design for more than a decade after receiving his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering at National Taiwan University. His engineering career, including 4 years as an entrepreneur, spanned across Taiwan and Silicon Valley, where he last worked for Qualcomm. Jerry obtained his MBA degree from HEC Paris and is a CFA Charterholder.

Jackie brings with him over 15 years of venture investment experience to the team, during which he was one of the most active investors in the semiconductor industry. Jackie focuses on components, hardware, and Greater China-related investment opportunities. His active current investments include Appier, Axonne, Dcard, eJoule, HZO, Immotor, Nuvolta, Pakal Technologies, Tango, UBiAi, and Winking Entertainment. Noteworthy past investments include Adwo (ACQ: Hunan TV), Montage (MONT), and SandForce (ACQ: LSI).

Before co-founding TransLink, Jackie was the Senior Vice President at UMC Capital and was responsible for UMC’s investment activities in the United States and China. During his tenure at UMC Capital, he was the founding investor in Maxlinear (MXL), Montage Technology Group (MONT), and Parade Technologies (4966.TWO), and served on the board of Praesagus (ACQ: Cadence Design System), WisChip (ACQ: Micronas), Triscend (ACQ: Xilinx), ForteMedia, Aicent (ACQ: Syniverse).

Having worked in industries of embedded software, IC design, telecommunications, medical devices and consumer electronics, Tony brings more than 20 years of management experiences in R&D and worldwide business development. Tony has served companies of diverse background and growth stages. This allows him to provide unique perspectives on organizational culture and corporate operations when coaching entrepreneurs.