China-based insurer Ping An, the largest non-state-owned financial service conglomerate in China, has embarked on a relatively large-scale international venture capital investment programme.
Lance Liu, investment manager of Ping An Ventures, is among those managing one of the three investment platforms for Ping An Ventures.
As Ping An’s international effort, the company has committed $100m, and has deployed $30m in eight deals in the first half of 2014. The group is focused on the high-tech and healthcare sectors.
Liu said: “I joined the team to source and manage overseas investments. We went to the US and Israel a couple of times to look for interesting opportunities.
“We started our overseas investments in Israel and now have gradually moved to the US. We do not have regional limitations nor size limitation, and we can back anything interesting for our group, business units and our customers.
“In China, we are very active in early-stage investments, including but not limited to series A and seed-stage companies. For overseas companies, we do co-investments together with other reputable funds to mitigate some of the country risk. Generally speaking, we are backing later-stage venture capital (VC) deals and early-stage growth companies, but we will also invest in very attractive early-stage VCs. Sometimes we also lead investments and conduct detailed due diligence to build trust with management in the sectors that we are good at, for example fin-tech. We tend to invest from a coupleof million to even $10m or more in a single transaction.
“We are trying to find interesting products and technologies overseas with the potential to be quickly replicated in China. We have more than an 80 million customer base and more than 4,000 branches in China, which could create a lot synergies with the portfolio companies”