tsinghua-university
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Sam Dai
Sam Dai is the co-founder and CEO of Enpower Greentech, a battery cell maker building semi-solid-state, lithium-metal, and silicon-rich cells. Trained as a physicist at Tsinghua and a materials scientist at UT Austin under Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough, he started the company in 2012 with fellow post-doc Che Yong. The company has shipped over 3 million solid-state cells, holds more than 100 patents, and runs facilities across the US, China, Japan, and Germany. Dai was selected for Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific 2024.
Walter Wu
Walter Wu is the founder and CEO of Hirey, a Palo Alto based recruiting technology company he started in 2021. A Tsinghua University graduate who cut his teeth on the chat-based hiring app Hirect, Wu built Hirey into a platform that pairs recruiters with vetted candidates and, more recently, uses AI to compress time-to-hire in high-volume sectors like home care and healthcare staffing. Backed by roughly $14M in disclosed funding, Hirey has since leaned into AI-native recruiting and an agent-mediated introduction network for founders, early hires, and collaborators.
Li Zhu
Li Zhu is the founder and CEO of Deptrum (光鉴科技), a 3D vision company building full-stack depth-sensing hardware and software powered by nanophotonics and AI. A Tsinghua undergraduate and UC Berkeley PhD in nano-optoelectronics, he led the depth camera module team behind Apple's iPhone X Face ID before leaving in 2018 to build a structured-light approach that sidesteps Apple's patent monopoly. Deptrum's depth cameras now ship into smartphones, smart cockpits, robots, IoT devices and palm-payment systems, and the company has raised through a Series B.
Daisy Cai
Daisy Cai is a General Partner at B Capital, the multi-stage venture firm co-founded by Eduardo Saverin. With nearly two decades of investment experience spanning Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and global markets, she heads B Capital's China expansion and leads investments in deep tech, AI, robotics, autonomous systems, clean energy, and space technology. Before B Capital, she was a Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund and Managing Partner of Baidu Capital and Baidu Ventures. She holds a B.S. from Tsinghua University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC, and an MBA from Columbia Business School - and has six U.S. patents in semiconductor chip design.
Jinlin Wang
Jinlin Wang arrived in the United States in 1996 with $50 in his pocket and a borrowed one-way ticket to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering. Three decades later, he is General Partner at Foothill Ventures, an early-stage fund that has backed seven seed-stage unicorns - five of them founded by Chinese immigrant engineers. Wang's career spans big tech (PeopleSoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Microsoft), startup founding (Auryc, acquired by Heap in 2022), and venture investing through three successive funds totaling over $311M. He holds 7 patents and a cross-disciplinary worldview shaped by Tsinghua University, the University of Connecticut, and Stanford - a combination that informs his conviction that the most interesting startups sit at the edges between fields.