Wen Hsieh

Wen Hsieh is the founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners, a HardTech-focused venture firm he launched after leaving Kleiner Perkins in 2023. Matter closed a $300 million inaugural fund in March 2024, backed by Kleiner Perkins, TSMC, individuals, entrepreneurs, and family offices.

Before Matter, Hsieh spent 17 years at Kleiner Perkins, where he was a longtime partner and later advisor focused on hardware-related investments. Kleiner Perkins lists him as supporting investments across companies including Ambiq Micro, Amprius, Bloom Energy, CesiumAstro, Crossbar, Desktop Metal, Dexterity, DJI, LightForce Orthodontics, Lumafield, LuxVue, Qumulo, Rapid Robotics, Relayr, and SpinLaunch.

Earlier, Hsieh was an associate principal at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco, where he led McKinsey’s Asia semiconductor practice and worked with companies across the global semiconductor value chain. He also served North American biopharma clients.

Hsieh founded OnChip Technologies earlier in his career, a startup developing MEMS microfluidic biochips for high-sensitivity and high-throughput peptide separation and identification. He earned a B.S. with honors, an M.S., and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, plus a Ph.D. minor in biology, from the California Institute of Technology.

• Matter’s thesis is focused on HardTech: “hardcore science and engineering that combines hardware and software.”
• Matter says it is “solely focused on building the next generation of HardTech startups developing the technologies that matter most, in the world we actually live in.”
• Hsieh told TechCrunch that Matter invests in “large seed rounds, Series A and Series B.”
• He described Matter’s six focus buckets as semiconductors everywhere, robotization driven by blue-collar labor shortages, generative AI, manufacturing on-shoring and friend-shoring, energy building blocks, and life-science automation.
• Hsieh’s stated common theme: “we like to invest in the next ‘picks and shovels’” for those trends.
• His hardware investing lens emphasizes component-level breakthroughs that unlock large markets; in a TechCrunch article on wearables, he wrote that “Battery life is by far the biggest obstacle” and argued for redesigned components with much lower power consumption.
• Matter emphasizes hands-on help beyond capital, especially early customers, scalable business models, strategic supply-chain partnerships, and manufacturing relationships.