Levi Liu

Levi Liu is a Partner at 5Y Capital, the Chinese venture firm previously known as Morningside Venture Capital. 5Y Capital’s team page lists him as a Partner; the Chinese team page identifies him as 刘凯. The firm says it manages more than US$5 billion and focuses on technology, life sciences, and consumer innovation.

Liu graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, entering in 2006 and earning a bachelor’s degree in 2010. USTC’s alumni association identifies him as a 2006 alumnus and says he has more than 10 years of venture-capital experience.

Before 5Y/Morningside, Liu worked at Tencent in strategy and investment-related roles. Public profiles and Chinese investor databases describe him as having Tencent strategy/investment experience before joining Morningside/5Y in 2014.

At 5Y, Liu is associated with the firm’s To B, software, data infrastructure, AI, and hard-tech practices. Public articles identify him as an investor in PingCAP, Deepexi, BestSign, Vastai/Hanbo Semiconductor, ONES, Tower, and Sensors Data.

• Liu’s stated focus is enterprise services, B2B/SaaS, industrial upgrade, cloud services, big data, and artificial intelligence.
• He looks for technology “bottom variables” rather than short-term market fashion; in a 2022 interview he described the approach as focusing on long-term technology shifts and “bold assumptions, careful verification.”
• In hard tech, Liu has described 5Y’s framework as “technology supply chain” investing, evolving from Xiaomi-style ecosystem investments to backing both category leaders and supply-chain ecosystem companies.
• He has said 5Y looks for innovation opportunities driven by large beta variables, specifically green energy and basic energy, labor-productivity improvement, and new globalization.
• For AI startups, Liu separates technical projects from problem-driven/product projects. For technical or infra projects, he emphasizes team and visible technical progress; for application products, he looks at retention, activity, conversion, and whether PMF is durable rather than relying only on ARR.
• His practical AI-founder advice: build the product, find users, and iterate. He said in 2025 that China’s AI startup market is “not overheated” and is still earlier than China’s 2010 mobile-internet wave.
• For founders, Liu has said he prefers seeing the actual product and design logic over a generic pitch deck: a founder should be able to walk him through the product flow and explain the thinking behind each detail.