Tai Panich has departed from the $700m CVC fund she formed in 2020 and has recruited corporate LPs for AI-focused firm AIconic Ventures.
Mukaya (Tai) Panich (above), the founder and CEO of financial services firm Siam Commercial Bank (SCB)’s SCB 10X unit, has left and launched her own venture capital firm, AIconic Ventures.
“After more than five years at SCB 10X, I think it’s a great opportunity right now to start my own fund, in this area of AI and deep tech,” Panich told Global Corporate Venturing. “Generative AI is at the forefront right now, a lot of people think that the fourth industrial revolution is happening right now, pretty much because of generative AI.”
Panich founded SCB 10X in 2020, growing its team from eight people at launch to more than 50 today, and had appeared on the GCV Powerlist twice, most recently in 2024. She will be succeeded as CEO by Kaweewut Temphuwapat, currently chief innovation officer at SCB’s fintech holding company, SCBX.
“I’m very confident SCB 10X is in good hands,” Panich told GCV. “We drew up a succession plan and he was my first choice to be the CEO. I’m very grateful he’s the new CEO, because he understands the innovation space very well, he’s been active in this area for a long time and has a lot of experience in things like building ventures and working with startups.”
AIconic Ventures reached its $200m first close last week, sourcing the capital from Southeast Asia-based corporate limited partners. Panich has not revealed their identity but says the firm is targeting $250m for its final close.
The firm will target artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics and deep tech, investing globally from seed to series B stage. Panich says she is consciously building it with a view to having a presence in both Singapore and Silicon Valley, essentially a bridge between the East and the West.
AIconic’s advisors include Lip-Bu Tan, the ex-venture capitalist who was appointed CEO of chipmaker Intel in March, and Amarjit Gill, Panich’s former boss at microprocessor producer SiByte, where she was a design engineer before the company was acquired by Broadcom for $2.2bn in 2000.
Freedom to invest in ‘the fourth industrial revolution’
Panich describes her time at SCB 10X as “very rewarding” and says it has taught her a lot, not just about investing but about building teams, backing entrepreneurs and managing relationships with corporates and partners. But she says the current environment for AI means now is the right time for her to move into a new area.
Although SBX 10X invests in AI and deep tech as well as financial and digital asset technology, it still has a strategic remit that is tied to its banking parent. AIconic will have more freedom to explore areas like hardware, particularly semiconductor technology that will be essential to making sure AI and the data centres that fuel it can run effectively.
“There is so much innovation happening in the semiconductor space for AI, beyond GPUs, which everyone knows about due to Nvidia,” explains Panich. “There are very exciting things happening with power semiconductors, which is a very critical area given shortages of power globally, especially in the US.”
Part of that involves reducing power dissipation in data centres with high performance demands, and one of AIconic’s first portfolio companies is Epic Microsystems, a stealth-stage startup working on advanced power management integrated circuits which manage power within data centres. An additional area of interest is optical interconnects, which use light to transmit electronic signals through microchips rather than the traditional copper.
Panich says she is also very excited about robotics, chiefly for precision manufacturing. Precision assembly technology developer eBots is another early portfolio company. But she’s also interested in robots for logistics and in humanoid robots, although she believes that these will take far longer to mature than currently expected.
A focus on hardware brings Panich full circle to her early, pre-VC career in semiconductor design. But as with Anna Patterson, who is working on her own AI-focused venture after founding and running a successful corporate VC fund, she is preparing to use her experience in CVC to take the next step in her career.
“Overall, corporate VC was an incredible experience that made me a better investor and leader. It taught me how to find opportunities in unlikely places, build great teams and make a meaningful impact,” she adds. “I’m excited to carry these lessons forward as we launch AIconic Ventures.”
