Donna See, the CEO of Xora Innovation, has left the deeptech investor while Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm DCM has named three new partners.
Temasek-backed Xora Innovation’s CEO Donna See exits
Xora Innovation‘s chief executive officer, Donna See has left the deeptech investor after four years. It is not known if a successor has been appointed yet at the firm.
“After four amazing years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Xora Innovation and move on to a new chapter, returning to my root and true passion of working alongside brilliant founders in the ‘-1 to 0, 0 to 1’ of a new venture,” she wrote in a Linkedin post on Thursday.
“I’m extremely proud of the efforts of the founding team with whom I worked shoulder-to-shoulder. In a short time, we built Xora’s reputation as a fair, disciplined, hands-on investor/builder, bringing a global standard to our local activities and a unique Singapore perspective to our global investments, forging non-obvious synergies between Singapore’s R&D bench strengths and top tier, institutional capital with sector specialization from across the world,” she added.
During her stint at Xora, See and her team also conceived and piloted Xora Venture Labs (XVL), a deep tech venture studio for Singapore, to engineer future unicorns with Singapore R&D DNA. The latest partnership inked between Temasek, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and National University of Singapore (NUS) leverages this platform.
Xora Innovation was set up in 2019 by Temasek and National Research Foundation (NRF) to invest in and support early-stage startups in the deeptech and science and technology sectors. The firm has invested in 16 deep tech startups to date, including Allozymes, SpeQtral, Neuvocor, and Proeona.
Global venture investor DCM promotes three new partners
Silicon Valley-based, early-stage venture capital firm DCM has announced that David Cheng, Kenichiro Hara, and Fiona Huang, have been internally promoted as new partners.
The three new partners will be tasked to help entrepreneurs build, scale, and sustain businesses globally, according to DCM’s general partner Hurst Lin.
Cheng joined the VC firm as an associate in September 2014, focusing on vertical SaaS, marketplaces, consumer applications, fintech, and digital health. Hara, on the other hand, joined DCM in July 2015 and has made contributions to the firm’s Japan practice.
Huang, who joined DCM in 2016 as an investment manager, focused on investments in Greater China and Southeast Asia, according to the announcement.
“We look forward to seeing how the next generation of partners helps our portfolio companies become some of the world’s leading technology companies,” Lin said.
DCM, which also has offices in Beijing and Tokyo, has over $4.2 billion of assets under management. It has invested in more than 400 early-stage tech companies worldwide.