Philip Liang

Philip Liang is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur, inventor, and investor who founded and runs E15 VC, a Hong Kong–based venture capital firm he launched in 2017. He earned an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab (roughly 2002–2006), where he was a research assistant and a founding member of the Smart Cities group. There he designed concept vehicles — reportedly working alongside architect Frank Gehry — and helped create the MIT "City Car," a stackable electric urban vehicle that won *Time* magazine's "Invention of the Year" award.

Before venture capital, Liang built several companies. He co-founded Snif Labs (an RFID pet-tracking startup) which pivoted into General Sensing — the healthcare sensor company he chaired, founded in 2005 with Jonathan Gips and run out of Boston and Hong Kong, working closely with the World Health Organization on healthcare monitoring (the company has since closed). He then founded Noon Home, a smart-lighting company, where from 2014 to 2020 he raised over $50M from backers including David Bonderman, Lux Capital, Shasta Ventures, Data Collective, and Dolby Ventures; Noon Home was ultimately sold to Racepoint Energy.

In 2017 Liang moved into full-time investing, founding E15 VC to back deep-tech founders globally while using his base in Hong Kong to connect US innovators with Asian capital. He has been an investor in SpaceX since 2014, and since July 2020 he has served on the board of Vicarious Surgical (NYSE: RBOT), a surgical-robotics company E15 backed early. His firm's Fund II ($32M) closed in January 2021 with Sun Hung Kai & Co. as a $15M anchor investor, and he has since targeted a larger Fund III.

• Invests in deep-tech companies solving "big problems" — surgical robotics, therapeutics, advanced manufacturing, and aerospace — from seed through later stages.
• Deliberately keeps a broad mandate across sector and geography, arguing that the best opportunities may be things "you've never thought of before or [that have] yet to be invented, so would you restrict your mandate?"
• Requires that every investment have the potential to return the entire fund, and runs concentrated portfolios (~10 companies per fund).
• Balances risk within a fund — roughly half toward faster returns, half toward longer-horizon, higher-development-risk bets.
• Emphasizes product-market fit and technically credible founding teams (many with hard-science/engineering backgrounds), reflecting his own MIT hardware roots.
• Uses Hong Kong as a strategic nexus, offering portfolio companies access to Asian markets and follow-on capital.