Nancy Hua

Nancy Hua was born in China and immigrated to the United States as a young child, growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where her father was a materials-science professor at the University of Pittsburgh and her mother worked variously as a waitress, restaurant manager, business owner, and Chinese teacher. She earned a scholarship to MIT and graduated in 2007 with a double major in mathematics and (computer science/writing), where she also captained the women's varsity fencing team. Motivated by the financial insecurity of her upbringing, she went into finance after graduation.

Before founding Apptimize, Hua worked as an algorithmic trader, leading the Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team at GETCO (later part of KCG Holdings) in Chicago and New York, writing Python models and monitoring high-frequency trading systems. After her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer (and her father with colon cancer), she relocated her team to New York to be near family; following her mother's death she reassessed her priorities and left finance in 2012.

In 2013 she co-founded Apptimize with Jeremy Orlow and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2013 (S13) batch. Apptimize built a drop-in SDK for A/B testing and feature experimentation in native iOS and Android apps, letting product teams ship and test variants in real time without app-store resubmission; at its peak the platform reached on the order of 300 million monthly active users and served customers among the top apps on both stores. Hua served as CEO from founding until October 2018, then moved to chairman. In August 2019, Apptimize was acquired by mobile customer-engagement company Airship. She was named to Forbes' 2015 "30 Under 30 — Enterprise Technology" list. Today she describes herself primarily as a writer and artist.

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed stage, primarily in early software and startup-infrastructure companies — reflecting her own YC-founder background.
• Her documented deals cluster around B2B SaaS / developer and founder tooling (legal-ops and reliability/status tooling), suggesting affinity for products that serve startups and engineering teams.
• On what makes a company worth backing, she emphasizes teams and collaboration over lone-genius founders: *"Real work worth doing can't be done alone… Everything I've done that's good I've worked on with other people."*
• As a founder she preached ruthless prioritization via an *"Is this a YC problem?"* framework — a lens she likely applies to founders' focus and execution.