Michael Chen

Michael Chen is a Partner at Kaiwu Capital, an early- and growth-stage venture capital firm founded in 2011 and headquartered in Beijing's China Central Place (Chaoyang District), with activity spanning Chinese and cross-border markets. His Kaiwu contact line is a Shanghai number (021), consistent with the firm's dual Beijing/Shanghai footprint. Kaiwu invests across a diversified set of sectors — information technology and TMT, media, healthcare and life sciences, energy/cleantech, hardware, and education — and has backed roughly 38 companies over its history, with High Tech and Life Sciences its most active categories.

Chen brings more than two decades of investment banking and private-equity experience to the firm. Since 2002, as a founding partner of Sinolion Capital, a Singapore-based investment bank, he has completed approximately ten IPOs of Chinese companies — managing the full IPO process including corporate restructuring, governance improvement, arranging independent directors and CFOs, pre-IPO investment, and public placement. Earlier, in 2001, he served as a Vice President at HUAXIA Private Equity, where he managed roughly RMB 1 billion and sponsored the largest securities firm in China along with seven China-listed companies, including A-share pre-IPO deals. From 1999 to 2000 he was a VP at SINOBIT, described as China's first incubation platform (sponsored by News Corporation), which provided incubation services to first-generation Chinese internet companies.

Beyond finance, Chen is the founder of GCX, described as the first carbon-credit trading platform in China, and he served as an advisor to the WWF China Climate Change Board, one of the country's largest environmental NGOs — reflecting a long-standing interest in cleantech and climate.

Chen completed an EMBA program at Renmin University of China, received Private Equity and Venture Capital training at Harvard Business School, and holds MS and BS degrees from Northeastern University (North East University), China.

• Invests at seed / early stage, consistent with an angel-investor profile, while the broader Kaiwu platform also participates in growth-stage rounds.
• Sector-diversified but tech- and life-sciences-weighted: IT/TMT, media, healthcare and life sciences, energy/cleantech, hardware, education, and business services.
• China-centric with cross-border reach into the US, Canada, and New Zealand — a fit for founders bridging overseas technology into the China market.
• Strong bias toward companies with a credible path to public markets or acquisition; Chen's core expertise is IPO execution (restructuring, governance, CFO/ID recruiting, pre-IPO and public placement), so a clear exit narrative resonates.
• Personal affinity for carbon/cleantech and climate ventures, given his founding of the GCX carbon-credit exchange and his WWF China Climate Change Board advisory role.