Hunting for Chinese Cloud Unicorns – with Eminence Ventures Founder Peter Cheng

The Harbinger - China Tech & VC Podcast

Today we have joining us Peter Cheng, who is founding partner at Eminence Ventures. Eminence just raised $120m for its second fund focused on backing Chinese enterprise software and cloud start-ups. After a decade of torrid start-up growth driven by mobile and consumer internet, China’s enterprise software market is poised for a breakout and expected to reach $40bn in revenue in 2025. Peter shares with us his formative experiences across eBay, AdChina (adtech start-up he founded that was acquired by Alibaba), and Tencent (as GM of ads products), before launching his career as a venture capitalist. Peter provides an overview of China’s cloud market, key opportunities across horizontal and vertical software, AI, and IT infrastructure. He describes key success factors and go-to-market strategy for such companies, including for portfolio companies Tsign and Recurrent.ai. Finally, Peter illustrates key differences between the US and Chinese environments and how that impacts the development trajectory of software companies.