Austin Hwang, senior principal at Honda Xcelerator Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Austin Hwang may be a senior principal at Honda’s Xcelerator Ventures unit, but his background is in startups, having co-founded document digitisation LearningPal as chief operating officer in 2019.
After LearningPal was acquired in 2022, Hwang had a short stint as a technology innovation manager in Fujitsu’s business incubation division, before being recruited by Honda. He says the switch from startups to corporate VC has enabled him to work with a wider range of people as he brings startups together with the carmaker’s business units.
“I like to bridge cutting-edge technologies and different people,” he says. “Given my engineering and technical background, and my interest in VC in general, I started doing some angel investments and then found out about the opportunity at Honda Xcelerator Ventures.
“I felt it would bring everything together: the technology side, the interest in VC, the ability to learn and grow and the ability to get in touch with clever founders doing cutting-edge technologies.”
“I like to bridge cutting-edge technologies and different people. I started doing some angel investments and then found out about the opportunity at Honda Xcelerator Ventures”
Hwang de-stresses with food. He took two weeks off last June to do a French pastry course in Paris and spent last Christmas in Osaka learning how to make a form of Japanese noodles called soba. He says baking is not too far from investing: you need patience and the right combination of ingredients at the right time.
“It is very similar to how we approach things, because ultimately, there is human safety involved with the products we provide,” he says.
“Pastry also takes time and patience. In our job, sometimes we monitor startups and they may not be the right fit, but we still have to be patient so maybe the startup and the business unit, or the corporate side, will find the right time. Patience and the correct sequence and steps are important and definitely can be applicable to what I do.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
