Lance Liu is a director at China-based Ping An Insurance’s corporate venturing unit, Ping An Ventures, established in 2012 with the launch of its $157m venture fund. Before joining the fund in 2014, Liu was an investment manager at Ping An’s China Asset Management unit for four years, looking after private equity investments and mergers and acquisitions.
Liu joined Ping An shortly after picking up his MBA from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, with a brief detour as an associate of Cushman & Wakefield Investors.
Liu is heading up an international effort by Ping An to identify technologies overseas that could be quickly replicated in China.
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 have gradually moved to the US. We do not have regional or size limitations. We can back anything interesting for our group, our business units and our customers.”
Explaining his investment strategy, Liu added: “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 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 fintech. We tend to invest from a couple of million to even $10m or more in a single transaction.”
Ping An’s Innovation Center was the first RMB1bn ($156m) fund established by a major financial institution in China, the company said back in 2012. Its ambitions have grown since then. In November 2015 alone, Ping An Ventures led social e-commerce company Mogujie’s latest $200m round, while Mogoroom, a standardised flat rental platform, obtained a $30m extension from IDG, Ping An and others, adding to the $25m first tranche it secured in 2014.