The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order): Arowana (Le) Yu, Ping An
Arowana Le Yu and Jiang Zhang have been managing directors at Ping An Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the China-based insurer, for nearly five years having both previously worked at consultancy McKinsey.
Ping An has made a statement of intent, committing this month $1bn to a healthcare and fintech fund, Ping An Global Voyager Fund, citing an ambition to become an “internationally leading technology investment pioneer”. Ping An has made startup investments through its Ping An Ventures unit since 2012 and the firm’s portfolio companies include unicorns Oscar, Mogujie and 58 Daojia.
Ping An Ventures has been highly active, with its 25-strong team publicising 36 deals on its website, including TripVIP and ZJ Wireless, and, more internationally, Hong Kong-based Prenetics, UK-based EToro, and US-based CliniCloud and 20/20 GeneSystems.
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 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, Yu and Zhang manage a team of 21, of which more than half are women, according to its website.
Yu previously spent just less than a year at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having once interned there, and completed his MBA at Harvard in 2009. Before this, he worked for US tech firms HP and IBM after his undergraduate degree in telecoms and finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
