Invests in
Sectors:
Locations:
Min Investment:
$100,000.00Max Investment:
$5,000,000.00Target Investment:
$1,500,000.00
Skills
Education
Lists including Simon
Investments
lunar.dev
Total Funding: $6M
Objective
Total Funding: $13M
AskFora
Total Funding: $2M
LastMile AI
Total Funding: $10M
Parallax
Total Funding: $24M
Trebellar
Total Funding: $4M
Revcast
Total Funding: $3M
Zendata
Total Funding: $2.2M
Bloomfilter
Total Funding: $6M
Distyl AI
Total Funding: $7M
Work Experience
2022
Founding Partner
2022
FirsthandVC invests in seasoned founders at the inception stage to build the future of autonomous agentic AI software. We provide more than capital—we connect founders with a unique network of industry leaders and accomplished entrepreneurs to accelerate their journey from vision to success.
2025
Producer & Founder
2025
Creating the premier AI conference for curated AI leaders and industry executives to connect and learn from each other. No hype, just real-world agentic AI.
2024
PEF Chapter Lead - NYC
2024
PEF is a community for the post-exit founders.
2013 - 2022
Angel Investor / LP
2013 - 2022
I invest personally in startups that are not within the scope of Firsthand.vc. I also invest in some funds as an LP. Highlighted personal portfolio: - Caper - AI self-checkout shopping carts (Acq by Instacart) - Indus.ai - construction intelligence (Acq by Procore) - Brightback - an automated subscription retention service (Acq by Chargebee) - Lawyaw - legal document automation (Acq by Clio) - Hummingbot - open-source crypto trading software - HomeCourt - an app that uses AI to record and track basketball shots, makes, misses, and location - Carta - company ownership management platform - Smith.ai - a receptionist service for live calls & website chat and other companies still in stealth mode. Select Web3: - OpenSea - Kraken - LikerLand Select funds: - Pantera Capital - Soma Capital - Animal Capital - 500 Global
CEO and Co-founder
2013 - 2019
PredictionIO is a machine learning server. It empowers developers to build predictive engines and deploy them as scalable web services in a fraction of the time. The open source version of PredictionIO is ranked by Github as the most popular Apache Spark-based ML projects in the world. Acquired by Salesforce in Feb 2016. Built up the Einstein Platform product team after joining Salesforce. Initiated and launched AI-related platform products.
2006 - 2010
CEO & Co-Founder
2006 - 2010
Created two popular social networking sites: 1. WaZhua -- an online VR entertainment world. Pioneered China's live digital DJs and Karaoke market. 2. CityIN -- a networking site for professionals. Developed face-recognition technology for photo-tagging, QR code service for users to scan up to 1000 Chinese characters of data from the site into their mobile phones and a real-time learning recommendation engine. Acquired Moochi, a Tsinghua University spin-off company, which developed an online video editing platform for the China market. Managed a 50-people company in Guangzhou and Beijing.
2004 - 2006
CEO & Founder
2004 - 2006
Established the online career social networking. Powered by social graph recommendation and NLP for automated resume matching.
2003 - 2004
CEO & Founder
2003 - 2004
Established a tutor-student matching platform. Operated 6 profitable SAT preparation centers under the name Elite1600.
2002 - 2004
Software Engineer, Core Technology, Retail
2002 - 2004
Developed the intelligent Financial Advisor for mutual fund recommendation.