Jim Li
Principal
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- Full Name
- Jim Li (李仲琪)
- Title
- Executive Vice President / Managing Partner (also listed as Senior Vice President)
- Firm
- Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF) and Industrial Technology Investment Corporation (ITIC), the venture-capital arm of Taiwan's ITRI
- Firm Type
- Venture capital fund (the source stub labeled him "Angel Investor," but his primary role is as a fund partner/executive; he does invest at early stages)
- Investment Stage
- Seed and Series A / early-stage venture (fund also participates in later rounds)
- Check Size
- ~US$1–5 million per deal (fund-level figure)
- Target Company Profile
- Startups building disruptive, platform-level deep technologies with defensible IP and cross-Pacific (Asia–North America) scaling potential
- Sector Focus
- Advanced materials, health / life sciences, ICT, IoT, robotics/automation, AI, and (via ITIC's Digital Economy Fund) digital technologies including cryptocurrency
- Geographic Focus
- Asia, North America, and Europe — with a Taiwan/trans-Pacific bridge orientation
- Location
- Taipei, Taiwan
Background
Jim Li is a semiconductor entrepreneur turned venture investor. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University (1984) and both an M.S. (1988) and Ph.D. (1991) in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds roughly 19 patents and has authored around 14 academic publications, reflecting a deep technical foundation.
From 1991 to 1998 he held hardware and software engineering roles at a series of U.S. technology companies, including Symbol Technologies and Telxon Corporation (both later absorbed into Motorola), Silicon Graphics, and Innomedia. In 1998 he co-founded IC Media Corporation, an early innovator in CMOS image sensors, where he served in director, VP, EVP, and CTO capacities. IC Media was acquired by Korea's MagnaChip Semiconductor in 2005 — the exit that anchors his operator credibility. He has also held executive roles associated with Ellie Mae and ProImage Technologies.
Today Li works on the investing side of Taiwan's technology ecosystem. He is an Executive/Senior Vice President at ITIC (Industrial Technology Investment Corporation, ITRI's VC arm) and at the Trans-Pacific Technology Fund, and is described as Managing Partner of ITIC's Digital Economy Fund, leading investments in AI, IoT, and cryptocurrency. TPTF itself was founded in 2014 and is based in Taipei, investing in disruptive platform technologies across Asian, North American, and European markets.
Investment Thesis & Focus
- Invests primarily at Seed and Series A in deep-tech and platform companies; the fund typically writes checks in the ~US$1–5M range.
- Sector focus: advanced materials, health/life sciences, ICT, IoT, robotics/automation, and AI — areas where the team claims "leading domain expertise."
- Emphasizes a trans-Pacific bridge model: backing companies that can move between Asian and Western markets.
- In his own framing, venture capital is "more than capital" — it means "bringing actual experiences from the battlefield, and bringing connections that serve the teams," reflecting a hands-on, operator-led approach informed by his own founder/CTO exit.
- Via ITIC's Digital Economy Fund, an active mandate in AI, IoT, and cryptocurrency/digital technologies.
Notable Investments
- Kata.ai (Indonesia) — conversational-AI / NLU commerce platform; TPTF led its 2017 Series A (US$3.5M).
- Finch Therapeutics Group — microbiome-based therapeutics company (later public).
- Apexigen — clinical-stage biopharma developing antibody therapeutics for cancer.
- Rancher Labs — open-source Kubernetes/container management software (acquired by SUSE in 2020).
- Googol Technology — smart manufacturing, robotics, and industrial-IoT motion-control systems.
- Heal — on-demand / house-call healthcare services.
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