AVITIC

ITIC

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Michel Chu

President

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Bruce Han

Vice President

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Jonathan Wu

Investment Manager

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Michel is a venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur, entrepreneurial coach, and adjunct professor. Prior to his role at ITIC, Michel was General Partner of Acorn Campus Taiwan, a venture fund focusing on early-stage life science and deep tech projects. In addition, he also served, on volunteer basis, as the Chief Innovation Officer of BioMedTW – Taiwan government's project office to oversee, facilitate and accelerate Taiwan's life science industry. Michel co-founded and served as Chairman and acting CEO of VSense, a company developing revolutionary semi-conductor-based biosensors for in vitro diagnostics. Michel co-founded GigaMedia (NASDAQ: GIGM) in 1997 and led the company through a $4.5B IPO in 2000, the largest non-US Internet IPO at the time.
Michel has extensive expertise in diverse fields from biotech, medical devices, telecom, mobile Internet, cloud computing to merger and acquisitions. He has been an active early-stage investor with 20+ years of experiences of inspiring, developing, and coaching entrepreneurial teams. Michel has a demonstrated track record of building and facilitating start-ups, particularly technology spin-outs from research institutions. Michel is a respected authority on entrepreneurship and is a sought-after judge / speaker / mentor at leading entrepreneurial activities.
Michel currently also serves as a member of the Science and Technology Council at the Board of Science and Technology of Taiwan's government, as an independent board member of DFI, Inc. (TWSE: 2397), and a board member of Epoch foundation. Meanwhile, Michel is an adjunct associate professor at National Taiwan University, giving courses on Multi-sided Platforms, Medical Device Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, Group Dynamics and Leadership.

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Bruce has been in the venture business for over ten years, and currently focuses on scouting the best ideas and tech globally, connecting them with ITRI and Taiwan’s manufacturing capabilities, and then bringing them to market.
He is an engineer and material scientist by training, and prior to ITIC spent over a decade in the semiconductor industry.
What's the greatest value you bring to startups?
I'd say it's not just experience in venture, but also deep experience and expertise in industry, from manufacturing to material sciences and semiconductor.
To you, what's the most important trait of a good VC?
A good VC combines solid industry experience with, at the same time, the ability to constantly learn and absorb entirely new ways of thinking and operating. And he or she needs to genuinely love helping startup teams to find resources, especially for founders who are working with VCs for the very first time.

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Jonathan Wu joined ITIC, the venture arm of ITRI, in 2018. He focuses on a ranch of deep tech verticals, including 5G infrastructure, communications, semiconductors, and green energy.
Since joining ITIC, he has engaged with multiple university incubators/ accelerators on the West coast to seek potential startups, including UCLA, UCSD, USC, Caltech, UW, …etc.; he also established a partnership fund with OSU in 2019. He enjoys working with early-stage startups and connecting them to resources in Taiwan, including suppliers, manufacturers, or channel partners at the right stage as the team expands.
Jonathan has a BA in Economics from UC San Diego. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, camping, and playing tennis.

APPLIED VENTURES

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Anand Kamannavar

Global Head

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Yuan-Ping (YP) Huang

Principal

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Walter Liu

Principal

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Anand Kamannavar is appointed vice president and the Global Head of Applied Materials’ venture capital fund. In this role, he manages Applied’s > $400M global venture investment portfolio of 90+ companies across 17 countries. Mr. Kamannavar has led over a dozen venture investments with successful exits including Adesto (NASDAQ: IOTS), Enphase (NASDAQ: ENPH), and Voltaix (acquired by Air Liquide).
Mr. Kamannavar has over two decades of experience in the technology and venture capital industry and new business development. He first joined Applied Ventures in 2006, with a focus on identifying and leading investments in the area of Semiconductor, Energy, Materials, and India. He then went on to head Applied’s new business group which led to Applied’s entry into Optics, Life Sciences, Materials, and other high growth markets.
Previously Mr. Kamannavar worked at Atlas Ventures and Arch Development Partners looking at startups in the broader Alternative energy, Internet, Web 2.0, Media, Software, and Medical sectors.
Before his career in venture capital, Mr. Kamannavar held various engineering and business development roles with Hewlett-Packard's server group in Richardson, TX where he was awarded key U.S. patents. He also co-founded Precision Information Systems which provides financial data and tools to leading financial institutions like Ameritrade, New York Life, and Intuit.
Mr. Kamannavar received an MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

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Yuan-Ping (YP) Huang is a Principal at Applied Ventures where he focuses on the intersection of Life Sciences and semiconductor manufacturing. He aspires to help accelerate development of next-generation diagnostic and research tools as well as novel therapeutic modalities by bridging capabilities of Applied Materials and emerging biotechnologies from portfolio companies.
Prior to joining Applied Ventures, YP was an early member of Lam Capital, where he built comprehensive proteomics product strategy and led investments in molecular profiling space. He also worked as an associate at McKinsey & Company, where he advised global pharmaceutical clients on R&D and operations.
YP holds a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from Columbia University as well as an M.S. degree in molecular medicine and a B.S. degree in zoology from National Taiwan University. In his spare time, he enjoys long runs, travel, and casual cooking.

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At AVITIC, Walter focus on AI, IoT & Big Data, semiconductor investments. As a passionate investor and value creator for his entire career, Walter has led both strategic and financial venture investments for multi-international technology corporations since 2016. Before joining Applied Ventures, Walter was the Head of US investment at MediaTek Capital. His investment portfolio includes startups in early and growth stages in US and China, including two unicorns and two exits. Walter has served as a board member or observer at AutoX, Abax Sensing, ScaleFlux and Mauna Kea Semiconductor since investing at Series A or Pre-A rounds.
Other notable deals that Walter has invested include Ventana Micro Systems, Ambiq Micro, DSP Concepts, and DeePhi. Prior to transitioning into venture capital, Walter was a senior strategic marketing manager at Qualcomm and wireless product manager at Huawei and Nokia. He also has seven years of ASIC application and system engineering experience at Qualcomm, Motorola and LCC International, where he designed AT&T’s CDMA network in Los Angeles and supported base station OEMs to deploy 3G networks around the world.
Walter has a MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from Cornell University and M.S. in electrical engineering from UCLA. In his leisure, he is a landscape and portrait photographer, enjoys international traveling with family and weekend traveling with his two daughters for fencing and rhythmic gymnastics competitions.

The team