Ann Cheng, a Rising Star last year, has been selected once again. She is a senior investment manager at Hyundai Cradle – Centre for Robotic-Augmented Design in Living Experiences – the South Korea-based carmaker’s corporate venturing unit. The unit looks to invest in developers of new technologies of strategic importance to its parent, for example, solid-state batteries for electric vehicles and self-driving vehicle technologies.
Having been with the unit since 2014, Cheng is responsible for identifying and reporting strategic investment opportunities and creating and managing pilot projects for new technologies.
In October 2018, she led a $16m series A round for US-based behavioural prediction software developer Perceptive Automata. The company applies neuroscience and psychology to its automated vehicles’ software programs in a bid to improve intuition and produce more human-like driving.
Cheng was quoted by the Toronto Star as saying: “We think about what that other person is doing or has the intent to do,” instead of focusing on the more classical problems “like object detection or object classification” which many artificial intelligence companies were working on. “Perceptive is trying to go one layer deeper than what we do intuitively already.”
Cheng has a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering from University of California Berkeley. Her previous investments, reflecting her engineering background, include a $20m series A round for Solid Power in September 2018 and a $65m series C round for Ionic Materials in February 2018, both of which are US-based solid-state battery developers. She also led a $10m seed round for US-based wireless technology developer Metawave in May 2018.
