The VCs who lengthy ran GGV Capital, the 24-year-old cross-border agency that helped function a bridge between the U.S. and China, have settled on two new manufacturers roughly six months after asserting they’d cut up their U.S. and Asia operations.
Veteran buyers Jenny Lee and Jixun Foo simply rebranded their Singapore-based operation as Granite Asia, as first reported in Forbes. Meanwhile, Hans Tung, a agency co-founder who lives within the Bay Area, introduced on X yesterday that the U.S. staff is now known as Notable Capital.
GGV Capital introduced final fall that was splitting up its staff amid rising tensions between U.S. and China, although it by no means cited the environment as the express driver of the transfer.
Sequoia Capital equally cut up up its operations final yr because it navigated geopolitical tensions. In Sequoia’s case, the U.S. staff held onto the storied model, whereas Sequoia India & Southeast Asia was rebranded as Peak XV Partners, and Sequoia China was rebranded as HongShan, the Mandarin phrase for redwood.
The considering in abandoning the GGV Capital model, per a supply acquainted, was that as a result of each groups are working individually going ahead, they felt it was finest to develop new manufacturers.
Granite Asia is being led by native Singaporeans Jenny Lee and Jixun Foo. Lee is an everyday fixture on Forbes’s Midas List of top-performing VCs, with 9 IPOs within the final 5 years, together with the good cellphone large Xiaomi and the software program growth firm Kingsoft WPS, which went public in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Foo, whose title was previously international managing director of GGV Capital, is in the meantime credited with offers that embody the electrical carmaker Xpeng Motors, which went public in 2020; ride-hail large Didi, which is reportedly planning an inventory in Hong Kong this yr; and the supply firm Grab, whose shares have underperformed because it grew to become publicly traded via a particular goal acquisition car in late 2021. (It was reportedly in talks as lately as final month to merge with one other beleaguered rival, GoTo Group.)
Granite Asia will deal with startups in China, Japan, South Asia, Australia and Southeast Asia.
Notable Capital – which says it plans to proceed investing within the U.S., in addition to in Europe and Latin America – is being led by the identical buyers who’ve been primarily based in its Menlo Park workplace for a few years. That contains Tung, who’s Taiwanese-American and whose offers embody identified manufacturers like Airbnb, StockX and Slack; Jeff Richards, who has backed Coinbase, the bluetooth monitoring outfit Tile, and the software program growth firm Handshake; and Glenn Solomon. His offers embody HashiCorp, whose software program that helps firms function within the cloud (it’s reportedly weighing a sale proper now); the publicly traded house-buying platform Opendoor; and the compliance automation startup Drata.
Oren Yunger, the latest member of GGV Capital, additionally stays on staff Notable. Yunger had joined GGV as an investor in 2018 and was promoted to managing director final fall.
Another longtime managing director at GGV Capital, Eric Xu, who relies in Shanghai, will proceed to supervise the unique agency’s independently operated yuan-denominated funds.
Roughly 2.5 years in the past, GGV Capital introduced it has raised $2.5 billion for its new funds, marking its largest household of funds ever. The buyers have since cut up these property below administration, together with the capital raised prior, such that Granite Asia is now managing a collective $5 billion altogether, leaving Notable Capital with roughly $4.2 billion primarily based on GGV Capital’s property below administration on the time the cut up was introduced.
Pictured above, left to proper: Jeff Richards, Eric Xu, Glenn Solomon, Jenny Lee, Jixun Foo, and Hans Tung
