SILICON DRAGON NEWS
SiliconDragonventures.com                                       Oct. 29, 2018         
FEATURED
PROGRAM

Silicon Dragon
Ventures & Awards
Hong Kong

November 15
5-9pm
Early bird 
tickets end
Nov. 1

Xiaodong Jiang  
Long Hill Capital
James Mi
Lightspeed China
Glen Sun 
Sequoia Capital China
Hoxton Ventures
Ian Goh
01VC
Wayne Shiong 
China Growth Capital
Vynn Capital
James Vuong    
IDG / Lana Group
Mind Fund Group
Ting Cheng 
Cherubic Ventures
.
Moderators:  
Rebecca Fannin Silicon Dragon
Napoleon Biggs
Web Wednesday
 
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KPMG
 
 
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Corporate Members of 
Silicon Dragon Circle: 
Arbor Ventures
China Creation Ventures
Lightspeed China
ZZ Ventures
Mind Fund
GGV Capital
Long Hill Capital
Northern Light VC
Hoxton Ventures
Lana Group
China Growth Capital
NEA
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and others joining soon! 
 
Robin Li, Co-founder of Baidu,
will reveal latest AI innovations this week in Beijing


I'm looking forward to hearing about the latest innovations at Baidu, the Chinese search engine that is an equivalent to Google.  Both are into artificial intelligence in a big way for self-driving cars and smart homes. I'm attending the annual conference, Baidu World, in Beijing this week and will report back. 
An article in the South China Morning Post notes that Baidu will challenge Google in the simultaneous translation field. The Baidu artificial intelligence system claims to be the first that can anticipate what's next and with little latency. It also is trained on data to work with sentence structures. 
See SCMP for more: Baidu's Superiority
 

Silicon Dragon Ventures & Awards
Nov. 15, Hong Kong
featuring
+ How far up for China venture, unicorns and funds? 
+ China's king of co-working spaces
+ Southeast Asia - next China opportunity for tech deals
+ Who will win for top founder, VC, tech deal of the year?
+ Networking reception
Early bird ends Nov. 1

   
DEALS
. .
 Sequoia Capital India  has co-led a $6.4 million investment in electric scooter service Beam in Singapore. Co-investors were Founders Fund, ZhenFund and Class 5 Global. Arbor Ventures also participated. The seed funding goes toward launching the scooter in Singapore then rolling it out to Malaysia, South Korea and Australia. If you haven't noticed already, scooters are where the action is in for urban mobility. 

The VC unit of Chinese electric automaker Nio, Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital have co-invested $30 million in Silicon Valley startup Innovusion to develop radar technology for autonomous vehicles. 

 Shunwei Capital has led a $4.3 million first round in Chinese startup Hitbot, developer of a light robotic arm.  Hitbot is cooperating with Huawei and Foxconn to save up to 75% in production costs. 

China Everbright and IDG Capital have poured $173 million in a Series B round in Terminus Technologies, a Chinese provider of IoT technologies in 70 cities. 

FUNDS

Bessemer Ventures in Silicon Valley has raised a new fund of $1.85 billion, slightly larger than its earlier funds. The firm will remain focused on investing early in promising technology companies. Each of the partners has the decision-making autonomy to provide $1 million to entrepreneurs and support late-stage companies with up to $100 million. Bessemer plans to invest in India but probably not China where it closed up shop years ago.  

In other funds news, Josh Kushner's (have you heard that name before?) Thrive Capital has raised $1 billion for its 6th venture fund. Will be interesting to see how much Asia impact it has. 


NOTEWORTHY

And you think China has bikes! Check out Amsterdam.
    Only it's old, owned bikes in Amsterdam, not the shiny, new, shared, rented cycles like in China. 
    In Amsterdam, the older the bike, the better. 
    I was in Amsterdam briefly to learn how the new "platform economy" or shared bikes, on-demand services and gig projects are reshaping work and life. Visits to Microsoft, a VR lab and a vertical farm showed Amsterdam's techie cool side. Bikes continually whizzed by me.   
    Read Forbes post: Platform economy