Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: #19 Nan Zhou & Saman Farid

When Yimin (Peter) Fang, senior director of corporate investment and mergers and acquisitions at China-headquartered internet company Baidu, rejoined former colleague Kai-Fu Lee at venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures last month it marked a period of changing personnel at the search engine provider.

Fang, ranked eighth on 2016’s Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) Powerlist, had joined Baidu in 2014 and covered strategic investments and mergers and acquisitions in areas such as adtech, big data, mapping, fintech and deep learning and his team led several strategic acquisitions to complement Baidu’s technology and product capabilities, including Kitt.ai, Raven Technology and xPerception, all of which are AI related. Its US deals include Uber, Velodyne, Cloudflare, Taboola, Planet Labs, ZestFinance, GraphSQL and SoundAI.

Melissa Ma, the wife of Baidu founder Robin Li, is now head of corporate venturing at the firm having rejoined the firm about a year ago to help act as a self-proclaimed “big sister” to its development and improve the odds of its bet on artificial intelligence (AI). This came just after Baidu towards the end of 2016 hired Qi Lu as chief operating officer who focused efforts on its core search engine’s mobile strategy and developing its AI strategy as effectively an engine inside everything, including through corporate venturing. Baidu has set up a host of corporate venturing initiatives at the earlier and later stage, including Baidu Capital and Baidu Ventures, with a GCV Rising Star selected in each unit.

Nan Zhou, Baidu Capital

Nan Zhou is a director at Baidu Capital (BC), based in San Francisco, California, and focusing on Silicon Valley’s mid to late-stage internet and tech companies, and AI’s ability to disrupt existing industries such as healthcare, transportation, industrial, and logistics. Zhou has been in her current role for six months, having made the step up from investment director at BC in July.

Under Jennifer Li, CEO of Baidu Capital and former chief financial officer for Baidu itself, and Jenny Wu, managing partner, BC is the later stage investment operation for the China-based search engine provider, complementing its Baidu Ventures and specific sector investment vehicles.

Prior to her current role, Zhou looked at a range of industries for BC in San Francisco, focusing on analysis and business strategy. BC’s initial investments include electric car maker WM Motors’ series B round in December, for a company that has reportedly raised $1.8bn in these two rounds, and Huochebang, an on-demand platform that matches trucks to users’, $156m B round in May and before its potential $2bn merger.

She has been laying the ground work to do so by conducting comprehensive and detailed research. Zhou has a range of experience split between tax and investment, allowing her to navigate both regulation and risk with relative ease.

Before she arrived at Baidu Capital in 2016, Zhou worked in the investment banking division at Jefferies as a senior associate. Prior to that, she was an assistant vice president at Barclays Investment Bank, working in Hong Kong on IPOs and M&A deals. She joined Barclays in 2013 after graduating from Wharton with an MBA in Finance.

After graduating from her bachelors program in 2008, she moved to graduate employer Deloitte and their international tax unit as a consultant in DC. She then spent two years at CSC as a senior associate in its global mergers and acquisitions  tax planning division, before taking up her MBA.

Saman Farid, Baidu Ventures

Saman Farid is the head of Baidu Ventures USA (BV), the US-based CVC arm of China-based search engine provider Baidu. Previously managing partner at Comet Labs, Farid is now on-board at BV after the two venture units’ partnership started earlier this year.

Wei Liu co-founded Comet Labs in 2015, before also leaving earlier this year to join Baidu, as both a VP for Baidu and CEO for BV. Farid, therefore, is joined by a familiar face. Comet Labs started as a venture unit with an explicit focus on machine intelligence, so while other CVC units are exploring AI outwards, BV has brought the expertise in-house. Speaking to TechCrunch, Liu reaffirmed this: “Baidu founded Baidu Ventures to build an ecosystem around AI technology and do investment to help AI startups with money, technology and connections to industrial players.”

BV has been active this past year, securing 12 deals. Half of these were series B rounds, with three totalling upwards of $25m. The rest were a mix of angel, seed and series A rounds. While the major share of these were for Chinese companies, the US operation played a significant role, securing four deals.

The firm backed US-based stealth machine vision company OpenVision in its seed round, worth a reported $3.45m. In March, BV backed US-based satellite-related communication technology company RBC Signal’s seed round, worth $1.5m.

In May, BV backed US-based scalable big-data solutions company Falcon Computing Solutions in its series B round. The round, worth $7m, was led by Intel Capital. BV took part in US-based robotic digitisation firm Ripcord’s $25m series B round in August.

Earlier this year, Farid told TechCrunch: “We think the most useful things we can give to startups are things they cannot buy with money like mentoring, expertise and the ability to fast track into production. These are things that, even with $100m, you might not be able to get overnight.”

Prior to founding Comet Labs, Farid was a VP at Legend Holdings, and was the director of Legend Star’s Silicon Valley office, Legend Holdings’ corporate venturing unit. His earlier career saw him found an e-commerce startup, work as CEO of logistics automation platform Falama, and as a project engineering manager for Global Partners United, working in clean energy. A control systems engineer by training, Farid has an MBA from both Tsinghua and MIT as part of its international MBA program.