Raymond Tang

Raymond Tang (唐毅) is a senior IT and technology executive who has spent his career across multinational corporates, venture investing, and entrepreneurship. Before moving into investing, he held management roles at major multinational technology companies, with Chinese reporting citing positions at firms such as Nokia and Microsoft. He later became a founding partner of the early-stage venture firm K&A Ventures (K&A Venture), where he worked as a venture investor — and, by his own account, was a heavy personal user of Evernote, storing passports, visa documents, and his children's school-application materials in the app long before he ran the company.

In November 2015, Tang left venture investing to join Evernote as its China general manager, after learning the Silicon Valley company was searching for a new China head. Over the next roughly 32 months he led a complex negotiation among three parties — US-based Evernote, Chinese investors, and the local management team — to carve the China business out as an independent entity. In June 2018, that restructuring closed: Yinxiang Biji (印象笔记) became an independent Sino-US joint venture, with Tang as CEO, backed by an initial (Series A) investment of several hundred million RMB from the Sequoia–CBC (Hongshan Broadband) Cross-Border Digital Industry Fund, a vehicle launched in 2016 by Sequoia Capital China and China Broadband Capital.

In March/April 2021, Yinxiang Biji completed a Series B round of several hundred million RMB. The round was co-led by Zhencheng Investment (真成投资) and the Shanghai Culture Industry Development Investment Fund, with follow-on from Dunhong Asset, Cowin Capital (同创伟业), and Ruili Investment. Crucially, the Chinese management team increased its stake to become the largest shareholder, making Tang — as chairman and CEO — the company's actual controller. A Sequoia–CBC partner, Xu Quanli (徐全利), publicly credited Tang with three "genes": those of a global-enterprise executive, a deal maker, and a pure entrepreneur.

Under Tang, Yinxiang Biji grew from a single note-taking tool into an "all-in-one" knowledge-and-productivity SaaS platform. The company reported surpassing 100 million users by late 2021 (and 200M+ cumulatively per later marketing), doubled paying users in 2021, and was valued at more than US$1.1 billion as of a September 2022 unicorn ranking, with a stated ambition to pursue a domestic (A-share) IPO.

• Background as an early-stage VC: Tang was a founding partner at K&A Ventures before operating Yinxiang Biji; his investing roots are in early-stage IT/technology.
• Dealmaker DNA: Sequoia–CBC partner Xu Quanli described Tang as combining the instincts of a "global-enterprise executive, a deal maker, and a pure entrepreneur" — the skill set behind the 32-month, three-party Evernote carve-out.
• Product / sector conviction: As an operator he is focused on productivity software, knowledge management, SaaS, and increasingly AI / natural-language processing — the B-round proceeds were earmarked for a new R&D center investing in AI and NLP.
• "Most realistic idealism": Tang frames the business around being a true, direct "second brain" for users, summarized in his repeated phrase about practicing "the most realistic idealism" (坚持最现实的理想主义) and prioritizing "operational quality" and continuous innovation over chasing trends — he has said the company "resisted the temptation of the风口 (hype cycles)."