Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Penglan Zhao

If you have been an investment banker (IB) working on $20bn of flotations and mergers and acquisitions over a three-year period then the move to venture capital (VC) investing can seem to involve rounding error amounts.

Penglan (William) Zhao, senior investment manager at Bertelsmann Asia Investments (BAI), the China-focused corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based publisher, therefore, has done his best to find deals that would have interested his former peers from his days working at JPMorgan and UBS.

For the nine investments Zhao has led on sourcing or execution for BAI since he joined in March 2015, “six of them have grown to the clear market leader in respective industry, and three of them have been up round to over $500m valuation”, the company’s spokesperson said.

Zhao takes the lead on BAI’s fintech coverage, and has sourced and led two deals in this sector: China-based online agriculture finance platform NFQ Finance(Nongfenqi) and China’s overseas-focused investment portal Meixin Finance.

He also led the deal of Yingshiji, a China-based online food delivery infrastructure and service provider.

In addition, BAI said Zhao “played an active role in executing transactions of significant deals, including two on fintech, China’s largest internet auto finance platform Yixin Capital, and China’s largest student loan originator Fenqile, and two China-based global companies: Bigo Live, the largest live-streaming app in south-east Asia, and Baca, the largest news aggregate portal in Indonesia and Brazil”.

Annabelle Long, head of BAI, said: “William made a wise decision to transform himself from IB to VC. He is proving his potential to realise BAI’s vision of seeking and supporting entrepreneurs who will be role models of the young generation.”

Zhao, who graduated in maths from Canada-based University of Waterloo, has also been actively involved in the communication and interaction between BAI and Bertelsmann headquarters and other business units, the company said.

And, unlike many investment bankers, the conversation would probably have been about more than his own deals.