Profile · Fintech & Civic Tech
Hsin Hsiao蕭新晟 · 蕭A
A theoretical physicist who traded academia for civic tech, then built the payment platform behind Taiwan's supporter economy.
Co-founder & CEO, OenTech (應援科技) · Taipei
A theoretical physicist who traded academia for civic tech, then built the payment platform behind Taiwan's supporter economy.
Co-founder & CEO, OenTech (應援科技) · Taipei
Hsin Hsiao runs OenTech, a Taipei fintech that most people never see but many rely on. When a donor gives to a charity, a fan sponsors a creator, or a supporter buys a ticket for a political rally in Taiwan, there is a fair chance the money clears through the platform he co-founded in 2021. OenTech pairs third-party payment processing with a CRM built for managing supporters, and today it serves more than 3,000 organizations across nonprofit, religious, entertainment, and political sectors.
His current work is less about moving money faster and more about deciding where money is allowed to move at all. OenTech carries the certifications that fintech founders usually treat as paperwork - PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 - and Hsiao treats them as the product itself. In June 2025 the company closed a NT$100 million Series A, and he has since taken a seat as director and cybersecurity committee chair at Taiwan's Third-Party Payment Association, helping write the rules for the industry he operates in.
What makes the story unusual is the route he took to get here. Hsiao did not come up through banking. He came up through physics, open-source code, and a losing campaign for city council.
Figures as reported by OenTech and Taiwanese press; growth rate is year-over-year customer count.
Trust will not be a compliance checkbox. It will be infrastructure.— Hsin Hsiao, on the future of AI-driven commerce
Hsiao was born in Tainan in 1982 and left Taiwan during high school to study abroad. He landed at UCLA, where he finished a physics degree magna cum laude in 2005 and a master's two years later. From there he went to Stony Brook University in New York to chase a PhD in theoretical physics. He spent five years on it before withdrawing in 2012.
Leaving a doctoral program is often framed as a failure. For Hsiao it was a redirection. He stayed in New York and moved into software, working as a senior engineer, a CTO, and a co-founder across a series of startups. He developed a taste for functional programming and for the kind of systems thinking that physics rewards - break a messy problem into clean parts, then rebuild it so it holds.
That instinct carried into the civic sphere. Around 2016 he became active in g0v, Taiwan's decentralized civic-tech community, and co-initiated a project called National Treasure. The idea was audacious in its simplicity: crowdsource the digitization of Taiwan-related historical documents scattered across foreign institutions, including the US National Archives and Stanford's Hoover Institution, and bring them home in machine-readable form.
In 2018, Hsiao took the civic impulse to its logical conclusion and ran for office. Standing with the New Power Party in Taipei's Neihu-Nangang district, he campaigned as a "harbor tech guy" and pulled 8,502 votes. It was not enough to win a seat. By late 2019 he had resigned from the party and its policy committee.
The loss pushed him back to engineering, but with a sharper problem in view. Through the campaign and his NGO work, he had run head-first into how badly Taiwanese organizations were served by existing fundraising and payment tools. Donations, memberships, event tickets, recurring sponsorships - each ran on brittle, disconnected systems, and none of it talked to a supporter database.
So he built the thing he wished had existed. OenTech launched in 2021 as a one-stop payment cloud that folded third-party payment processing into a CRM designed around supporter relationships. The pitch was practical: give an organization one place to take money and to remember who gave it.
The market answered. Within a few years OenTech's platform was being used across the political spectrum - by rival campaigns, parties, religious groups, creators, and charities alike. A tool built by a candidate who lost ended up serving the candidates who won.
Hsiao's newest bet is on what he calls agentic commerce - a near future where an AI agent, not a person tapping a screen, initiates a payment. His concern is the same one that has followed him since National Treasure: how do you know the actor is who it claims to be, and how do you let money move only where it is trusted to go. OenTech has been building toward a conversational, AI-driven payment layer and testing where it fits.
The company is also looking beyond Taiwan. Hsiao has spoken about a Japan market proof-of-concept and about preparing OenTech for a listing on the Taiwan Stock Exchange's Innovative Board within a few years. For a 13-person team, the ambitions run large - which is roughly the ratio he has operated at his whole career.
The fundraising tools were too hard to use, so I built my own.— On why OenTech exists
He goes by the nickname Hsiao A - a short, friendly handle that follows him across Taiwan's tech scene and his social profiles.
He favors functional programming and systems thinking, habits he traces back to years spent on theoretical physics before ever shipping production code.
From g0v to fintech, his throughline is open, collaborative building - and a stubborn preference for fixing the thing everyone else complains about.
Sources include Wikipedia (zh), LinkedIn, OenTech, Taiwan Tech Arena, Crunchbase, INSIDE, Business Today, pourquoi, and New Bloom Magazine.