An operations engineer from Petaling Jaya who sold a startup to Walmart, ran a country's innovation agency, helped rewrite the rules of venture capital, and now runs Tiny Health out of Austin. Three startups. Three continents. Zero patience for waiting around.
In 2020, Cheryl Sew Hoy started over. Not because the last thing failed, but because she had found a new problem worth a decade. She founded Tiny Health in Austin, a precision science company built around the microbiome, and went looking for capital the way she always does: with a thesis and a stubborn read on where the market would land.
It worked. In March 2024 the company closed an $8.5M Series A led by Spero Ventures. The detail that says everything about how she builds: roughly a quarter of that round came from the company's own customers. People who use the product wanted a piece of the company. You do not engineer that with a pitch deck. You earn it.
By 2025 the company had pushed into the EU, Canada and Mexico, and was named Start-up of the Year by NutraIngredients-USA. The team sits around 68 people. For a founder on her third act, the pattern is familiar: spot the thing early, build it carefully, ship it everywhere.
What is different this time is the subject. Her first companies were about commerce and lists and deals. Tiny Health is about understanding human biology and turning it into something a family can actually read. The engineer who once optimized operations now optimizes for clarity.
"It wasn't a rare thing. It was considered normal in the start-up world." Cheryl Sew Hoy, on speaking out
Her first company, CityPockets, launched in New York in 2010, a digital wallet for the daily-deals era. She raised $770,000 and learned the brutal arithmetic of a market that moves faster than your roadmap. So in 2012 she pivoted, hard, into Reclip.It, a personalized list-making and shopping app.
In 2013, Walmart Labs acquired Reclip.It. A Malaysian engineer who had bootstrapped her way through New York sold her company to the largest retailer on earth. Most founders would frame that as the finish line. For her it was a credential.
Because a year later, the Malaysian government came calling. In 2014 she was recruited to be founding CEO of MaGIC, the national innovation agency, launched with a multi-million dollar grant and a mandate to wire up an entire country's startup ecosystem. She built accelerator programs and pulled in partners like Stanford and Techstars. She had gone from raising money to deploying it at national scale.
By 2016 she was back in San Francisco as CMO of Hack Reactor and keynoting the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, a stage that also held President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. The throughline across all of it is not the logos. It is the refusal to stay put once the interesting part is done.
Co-founds CityPockets in New York. Raises $770K.
Pivots to launch Reclip.It.
Reclip.It acquired by Walmart Labs.
Founding CEO of MaGIC, Malaysia's national innovation agency.
CMO at Hack Reactor. Keynotes the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.
Co-founds #MovingForward for diversity in venture capital.
Founds Tiny Health in Austin.
Closes $8.5M Series A led by Spero Ventures.
International expansion. Named Start-up of the Year.
In 2017, Cheryl Sew Hoy went public about misconduct she had experienced in the venture world. She chose not to press charges. She chose, instead, to raise the alarm about how power gets abused in tech, and to make it impossible to call her experience an outlier.
Time magazine named the women who spoke up that year its Person of the Year, the Silence Breakers. She was among them.
She did not stop at telling her story. In 2018 she co-founded #MovingForward, a public directory that let founders see which venture firms had committed, in writing, to anti-harassment and diversity standards. A list. From the founder who once built an app out of lists. The format was familiar. The stakes were not.
Named among the Silence Breakers, Time's Person of the Year.
Co-founded a public accountability directory for venture capital.
Awareness over retribution. Build the system that protects the next founder.
Three rounds, one direction. The Series A in 2024 was the headline, but the seed laid the track. Bars scaled to capital raised, in millions.
Sources: Tiny Health, Crunchbase, public reporting.
Chosen in 2013 as one of ten Global Ambassadors to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity. The training apparently transfers to fundraising.
Her LinkedIn is still "cherylyeoh," the maiden name she built her first two companies under. Some brands you keep.
Inducted into Cornell's Sphinx Head honor society as a student. The engineering came with a side of legend.
Profile compiled from public sources. Facts only, no filler.