Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Jenny Lee was born in Singapore to a schoolteacher father and grew up in a household where academic achievement was central. She won a government scholarship that paid for her engineering degree at Cornell, then came home and worked as a jet engineer at ST Aerospace. She quit that job, borrowed S$300,000 to buy out her scholarship bond, moved to Hong Kong, and entered finance at Morgan Stanley. She paid off the debt within a year.

That is the origin story of one of the most consequential venture investors in Asian technology history.

The GGV China Build

Jenny Lee investments began in earnest when she joined GGV Capital as a managing partner in 2005 and moved to Shanghai with, as she has described it, "a suitcase full of renminbi" to build the firm's China investment platform from scratch.

Her portfolio over the following two decades includes some of the most consequential technology companies in Asian history. She invested in Alibaba's early rounds at a time when Chinese e-commerce was a speculative bet. She backed Xiaomi in 2010, before the smartphone brand became one of the world's largest. She invested in Toutiao, the ByteDance news aggregation product that became the parent company's first hit. Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing company, was another GGV bet. Grab, the Southeast Asian super-app, was a cross-border investment reflecting her view that the emerging market internet opportunity extended beyond China.

GGV became one of the most successful cross-border VC firms in history by building equal-strength investment practices in both Silicon Valley and China, with Lee as the principal architect of the China side.

Granite Asia and the Geopolitical Pivot

In July 2023, a US House of Representatives committee announced it would probe investments by US venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, in China's AI and semiconductor sectors. In September 2023, GGV announced it would split into two independent firms: Notable Capital, focused on US investments with a commitment to no further China investing; and a Singapore-based fund focused on China and Southeast Asia.

In March 2024, Lee and partner Jixun Foo led the now-independent Asian fund, rebranded as Granite Asia, a callback to GGV's original name, Granite Global Ventures. Granite Asia has $5 billion in assets under management, 48 companies with valuations exceeding $1 billion, and 29 IPOs across its portfolio history.

Lee has been clear about the strategic logic. She sees Asia as an underserved market for institutional venture capital relative to its economic scale and startup density. The split from GGV was an opportunity to build a dedicated Asia-first firm rather than a cross-border one.

Eric Bahn of Hustle Fund has noted that the most interesting opportunity in early-stage investing today is in markets where capital supply is still disproportionately thin relative to the quality of founders. Lee's entire career has been an expression of that thesis: she went to China in 2005 when very few US-trained investors would. She is applying the same logic to broader Asia from Singapore now. Angel Squad members investing across 50-plus countries apply the same geographic arbitrage thinking to their own portfolios. Find the community at hustlefund.vc/squad.

What Early Asia Investing Required

Lee has described setting up GGV's China office in Shanghai in 2005 as requiring conviction against significant friction. Chinese internet infrastructure was nascent. Foreign venture capital was uncommon. Legal frameworks for foreign private equity in Chinese technology companies were complicated. And exits, which required either a domestic listing or a US cross-border IPO, were structurally difficult.

The investors who committed to that market early, when the barriers were highest, captured the most value. Alibaba's NYSE IPO in 2014 was then the largest in history at $168 billion. Didi went public in 2021. Xiaomi listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018. Each outcome required a decade of patient holding through market cycles, regulatory uncertainty, and geopolitical friction.

Lee has made the same bet in Southeast Asia and India. The Grab investment is a cross-border bet that the consumption patterns driving China's consumer internet boom will repeat across ASEAN as smartphone penetration deepens. That thesis is still playing out.

The Granite-Integral Joint Venture

In March 2025, Granite Asia announced a joint venture with Integral Corporation, a Japanese private equity firm. The initial capital is $100 million. The goal is to facilitate investments in high-growth companies expanding to and from Japan, capturing cross-border flows between Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.

Japan is an underappreciated market for early-stage technology investment: a large, wealthy, technologically sophisticated population with significant startup infrastructure gaps relative to its economic scale. Lee's Japan joint venture is a direct expression of the same greenfield thesis she applied to China in 2005.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund, who has extensive experience investing across Southeast Asia, has noted that the best international investors are those who develop genuine operational presence rather than flying in and flying out. Lee's career trajectory, from Singapore to Hong Kong to Shanghai and back to Singapore, reflects that kind of embedded geographic knowledge. Angel Squad members building cross-border investment practices can explore the community at hustlefund.vc/squad.