Vivian Cheng

Vivian Cheng is a Partner at N47, where her team describes its approach as “Product First”: investing when the product itself shows early signs of customer pull and category potential. Her N47 profile lists her location as Silicon Valley and her sector focus as Applications and Systems.

Cheng joined Next47, now N47, as a Partner in 2024 after working as a Principal at CRV from November 2021 to March 2024. Before CRV, she was a Principal at Javelin Venture Partners from February 2019 to November 2021 and an investor at Cota Capital from July 2017 to February 2019.

Before venture capital, Cheng worked at Uber, including roles in finance and payments strategy from 2013 to 2017. Her N47 bio ties that operating experience to her investing lens, noting the impact of Uber as a product that changed how people move. She studied at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where her LinkedIn profile lists Global Leadership Program participation, a Presidential Scholarship, and CFA Level II candidacy.

• Cheng focuses on founders with a strong product point of view. In her words, she gravitates toward founders who believe “great products aren’t built just with code, but with empathy, velocity, and clarity of vision.”
• N47 looks for early products that are already in users’ hands and generating real signals: user love, urgent feedback, surprising use cases, builder instinct, learning velocity, and craftsmanship.
• She has backed AI-native platforms that automate complex workflow categories rather than simply adding AI features, including patent work, home health administration, financial operations, construction estimating, and go-to-market analytics.
• N47 emphasizes hands-on go-to-market support, including 1,000+ enterprise relationships, qualified introductions, and help with early critical hires.
• Her recent writing points to vertical AI opportunities where software can automate “last-mile” operational work while preserving human judgment, trust, and domain expertise.