A member of the top 100 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
Le Yu has been managing director at Ping An Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the China-based insurer, for nearly four years.
Ping An Group set up its ventures unit in 2012 with RMB1bn ($150m) to back new ideas and startups in finance, consumption, healthcare, automobile, social network and artificial intelligence and its website list 37 deals in that time, including TripVIP and ZJ Wireless, and more internationally, including Hong Kong-based Prenetics, UK-based EToro, and US-based CliniCloud and 20/20 GeneSystems.
Jonathan Cohen, 20/20’s CEO, at the time of its $4.5m A round in January said: “Beyond China, we plan to rapidly introduce our novel technology in other Asian nations, Europe, and the US. Ping An, as a major provider of health insurance in China, will be an extremely important strategic partner in this effort.”
And while many of these deals are early-stage, Ping An has led larger deals, such as Mogujie, a China-based e-commerce platform based on social networking tools that raised $200m in November.
Under the ultimate leadership of Peter Ma, chairman of Ping An, Le manages a team of 21, of which more than half are women, according to its website. His other MD, Jiang Zhang, also worked at management consultants McKinsey about the turn of the decade.
Le was a senior associate at McKinsey, while Jiang was an associate. Le had previously spent just less than a year at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having previously interned there, and completed his MBA at Harvard in 2009. Before this, Le worked for US tech firms HP and IBM after his undergraduate degree in telecoms and finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
