Jozua Pung, investment manager at Genting Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2026.
Jozua Pung is one of three investors at Genting Ventures, the investment arm of Genting, the Malaysian conglomerate known for its leisure and hospitality operations, as well as agriculture and energy interests.
Pung started his career as a financial auditor and gained an early interest in helping smaller companies restructure and return their operations to profitability. He took on a venture capital role at Singapore-based venture capital firm Monk’s Hill Ventures, where he worked to support portfolio companies and help founders head off avoidable mistakes. “My main job was to detect problems of startups early,” says Pung.
He joined Genting Ventures in October 2022 and much of his role, alongside making investments in startups, is to look for promising technologies that would benefit Genting’s many business units. The vast scale of Genting is a challenge – the company’s structure is vast and decentralised, encompassing thousands of employees spread over multiple business units.
“Much of his role, alongside making investments in startups, is to look for promising technologies that would benefit Genting’s many business units.”
Investments have ranged from gaming and entertainment, food tech and software-as-a-service startups to fledgeling companies building financial services technologies, such as a crypto on/off ramp provider and a lending platform for small farmers.
While navigating stakeholders across a large corporate, Singapore-based Pung maintains a strong empathy for startup founders, not least because he is building his own business, a men’s skincare brand that he runs as a sideline.
The unit’s investment focus is dominated by AI, particularly startups developing enterprise AI and AI-enabled robotics. Strategically, the team has moved to investing at an earlier stage, writing pre-seed cheques, often among the first capital in young US startups.
Genting Ventures is also looking to invest in Asian AI companies. Pung says Singapore’s AI ecosystem is becoming increasingly vibrant, with many Chinese AI founders moving in to start companies.
The Rising Stars are early-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2026 here.
