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Investors

K2 Global

Founded by pioneering tech investor Ozi Amanat in 2015, K2 Global is a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley and Singapore. Amanat, who moved to Singapore in 2012, is one of Twitter’s early backers, raising $25m to invest in the social media startup that later went public in 2013. The Harvard graduate in psychology and economics also invested in Uber, Spotify and Alibaba during his career as a venture capitalist. Amanat is the chief investment officer of K2 VC, K2 Global and Singapore-based Spice Global controlled by Indian billionaire B K Modi.In 2017, K2 also announced a $183m VC fund focusing on early-stage startups that aim to address global challenges. The majority of K2 limited partners are based outside the US in countries like Australia, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia.

• USA

Investors

Mark Pincus

Mark Pincus is the US co-founder of online social game maker Zynga, known for the mobile app games Words With Friends, Mafia Wars and FarmVille. He is also the managing member and co-founder of VC firm Reinvent Capital and a prolific angel investor worth $1.6bn, with early investments in Facebook and Twitter. To date, Pincus has invested in more than 50 startups and managed numerous successful exits including the aforementioned social media giants. His most recent investments include participation in the April 2021 $10m Series A round of US gaming app Underdog Fantasy and in the April 2021 €23.1m Series B round of Finland’s Yousician, the world’s largest music edtech.

• USA

Investors

Katalyst Ventures

Founded and headed by Susan Choe in 2018, Katalyst Ventures is based in San Francisco with a debut fund of $34m raised in 2018. Choe is also a partner at another Zipline investor Visionnaire Ventures (VV) also based in Silicon Valley. Katalyst invests in seed and early-stage tech startups with human-centric solutions. About 45% of the VC funds are invested in startups with women as CEO or CTO.  By February 2020, the Kalatyst portfolio included 22 enterprises and three exits.The founder of Outspark was removed as CEO by the board of directors due to disagreements over the sale of Outspark. She had used her own money in 2006 to create Outspark, a data-driven publishing platform for game developers. Outspark was eventually sold to Axel Springer and Choe went left the company to join Taizo Son’s venture capital group. In 2013, VV was set up to support tech startups in the US. Choe had worked for Yahoo! and also was the COO of the public-listed holding company of South Korean search and media company NHN.

• USA

Founders

Anirudh Sharma

R&D and business lead and co-founder of Graviky Labs

Anirudh Sharma is one of three co-founders of Graviky Labs, which makes ink out of carbon that is captured from pollution and purified using proprietary technology. This concept was born from Sharma’s experiments making ink from candle soot while doing his master’s at MIT Materials Lab. He currently leads R&D and business at the firm. Sharma’s interests include augmented reality, wearable computing and environmental projects. Over the years, he has developed and patented various technology products with social and environmental impact. He was formerly CTO and co-founder of India’s first wearable technology company, Ducere Technologies, which was later sold. This company makes Lechal, the world’s first smart haptic device for shoes, initially designed by Sharma as a navigation aid for the visually impaired. Sharma also previously worked for Imagin Group at Hewlett Packard Labs, on a multimodal speech and touch-based computer-aided design interface for large displays.Sharma holds a master's from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-led the activities of MIT Media Lab India from 2013–2015. He is a TED and TEDx speaker and has been included in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Asia, MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers of 2016. 

Founders

Martin Roscheisen

CEO and founder of Diamond Foundry

Martin Roscheisen is an American-Austrian tech entrepreneur. He is CEO and  co-founder of US-based unicorn Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral producer of lab-grown diamonds. He has worked there since 2012, prior to the company’s official establishment in 2013.Roscheisen holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where his classmates included Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He is one of the first generation of internet entrepreneurs, and has been involved in starting a number of companies. Before starting Diamond Foundry, Roscheisen headed the $640m solar startup Nanosolar from 2002–2010 as its CEO and founder. This was Silicon Valley's first solar power tech startup financed by American venture capital and, at the time, the highest-valued solar startup.When Nanosolar closed due to cheaper competition from China, much of its remaining technical expertise and resources went to setting up Diamond Foundry.In addition, Roscheisen was also formerlyCEO and the founder of eGroups. One of the first social media platforms to reach 50m users, the firm was acquired by Yahoo!.CTO and co-founder of enterprise software firm TradingDynamics, which sold to Ariba for $1.2bn.CTO and co-founder of FindLaw, a leading Internet legal site eventually sold to Thomson Reuters.In 2003, Fortune Magazine named Roscheisen one of America’s 40 Under 40, and one of the top 10 entrepreneurs in the country.

Investors

Baring Private Equity Asia

With currently over $21bn of AUM, Baring Private Equity Asia (BPEA) was started in Hong Kong in 1997 by Jean Eric Salata, as the regional Asian PE investment arm of UK-based Baring Private Equity Partners. With $300m in its first fund, it focused on riding China’s economic rise spurred by the country’s market liberalization. In 2000, Salata led a management buyout of BPEA and continues to head the firm today as CEO and Founding Partner. BPEA has invested in more than 100 companies, across healthcare, logistics, IT services, media, education, financial services and retail. It is one of the largest independent PE firms in Asia and has eight offices across the continent.With offices in China, India, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, it currently has around 43 portfolio companies, almost all Asia-based, across multiple business segments in tech and non-tech startups, especially in bricks-and-mortar education establishments. It also makes acquisitions, including most recently of US outsourcing services company Virtusa in February 2021.Other recent investments include in the June 2021 $85m Series C round of Portuguese home physiotherapy tech solution SWORD Health, the world’s fastest-growing musculoskeletal solution, and in the November 2020 $198m Series D round of Chinese computer coding for kids edtech Codemao. 

• China

Founders

Tessa Clarke

CEO and co-founder of OLIO

Tessa Clarke is the British CEO and co-founder of food-sharing app OLIO that was inspired by her experience of having to throw away perfectly good unused food when she was packing up to move from Switzerland back to the UK in 2014.After graduating with a first-class degree in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge in UK in 1997, she worked for three years at the Boston Consulting Group as a junior associate. She joined an MBA program at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2002 and met Saasha Celestial-One, who was also studying for an MBA at Stanford. In 2015, Clarke and Celestial-One decided to use their savings to create a food-sharing app OLIO after successfully testing the idea as a private WhatsApp group in North London.Before becoming an entrepreneur in 2015, Clarke has held various senior management roles since completing her MBA in 2004. She worked for global business publisher EMAP from 2005 until 2009, when she joined Dyson Inc as e-commerce managing director (MD). In 2013, she left Dyson to become MD of fintech PayLater based in Switzerland run by the Wonga payday loan company. Known then as Tessa Cook, she later became Wonga’s MD for eight months when she was tasked with “cleaning up” the tarnished reputation of the high interest loan company. From 2013 to 2021, she was also chair of the management board of St George’s Palace, a boutique apart-hotel and spa complex in Bansko, Bulgaria.In 2018, she became a fellow at Unreasonable, an organization that supports social and environmental entrepreneurship. For two years until 2021, Clarke was ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100 global event that advocates the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a board member for six years at Contentive, a global B2B media and information company. In 2021, her busy schedule now includes becoming a business mentor for not-for-profit Virgin Startup.