Lake Dai

Overview

Lake Dai is an angel investor and managing partner at Sancus Ventures, focusing on early-stage technology companies in the United States. She has over 10 years of experience in venture capital, specializing in sectors such as cybersecurity, enterprise software, education, artificial intelligence, robotics, mobile, consumer internet, higher education, and big data. Her investment strategy targets pre-seed, seed, and early-stage companies, with investments ranging from $250,000 to $1 million. In addition to her investment activities, Lake serves as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching Applied AI in the Master of Engineering program. She has a strong background in product and engineering, having worked as an early employee and product engineering executive at Alibaba, where she was employee #84 and Head of Product, as well as at Yahoo!, Overture, and various Silicon Valley tech startups. She played a key role in building Alibaba's B2B marketplace from the ground up. Lake is also dedicated to making a positive impact in the tech industry and is involved in several non-profit organizations. She serves as Chairwoman of HYSTA, one of the largest non-profit organizations empowering Chinese American tech founders, and is a member of the executive team of Stanford Women on Boards, leading the technology experience group. She is the inventor of five U.S. patents in search algorithms, recommendation algorithms, and text tokenization.

Investment Focus

• Early-stage technology companies in the United States

Portfolio Companies