What would Qiming Venture Capital be like without Liang Yingyu?

Author | Ren Qian

Editor | Chen Zhiyan

The management change of Qiming Venture Partners, which has been circulating for some time, has finally become clear.

According to ChinaVenture, Managing Partner Nisa Leung is about to leave Qiming Venture Partners, where she has worked for 18 years. According to its "Ten-Year Successor Plan", Managing Partner Duane Kuang will also gradually step down in the future.

The core of the relay management team consists of three members: Hu Xubo, who was promoted to Managing Partner in July 2015; Zhou Zhifeng, who was just promoted to Managing Partner in May 2024; and Chen Kan, who was promoted to Partner in January 2022.

Coming from the era of US dollar funds, the 18-year-old Qiming Venture Partners has finally ushered in its "coming of age".

In the current management structure of Qiming, Zhou Zhifeng is mainly responsible for investing in the frontier technology field, which is largely unchanged from before; while the one with the biggest role transformation is Chen Kan - in addition to being a partner, he, together with Hu Xubo, serves as the co-head of Qiming's medical investment team. Chen Kan, a "scientist-turned-investor", was previously regarded as "someone nurtured by Nisa Leung".

Investment is ultimately a people's business, and the succession of partners has always been a key issue for the continuation of an investment institution's brand. And Chinese VCs have also reached this point one after another. However, looking at the entire primary market, there are not many institutions that have truly achieved the "second-generation succession". In recent years, Duane Kuang has mentioned many times that Qiming Venture Partners has its own preparations for succession -

"It is best to build the organizational echelon when older and more experienced colleagues are still working hard, rather than hurriedly filling these vacancies when the older generation decides to take it easy." Duane Kuang once told "DarkFlow Waves". He also responded to the question of "when to retire" in an interview in 2023, "When I retire, there will not be a big vacuum in Qiming Venture Partners."

This gradual departure of Nisa Leung inevitably reminds people of the departure of Gan Jianping five years ago: Both are star partners on The Midas List, and both are names that people easily think of when it comes to Qiming Venture Partners. The fields they focus on investing in are also undergoing a transition.

In June 2019, the "DarkFlow Waves" team exclusively reported the news that former Managing Partner Gan Jianping left Qiming Venture Partners to establish a new institution (later known as INCE Capital). At that time, Gan Jianping had led the investment in a series of companies such as Bilibili, Dianping, and Meitu at Qiming Venture Partners. Before announcing his departure, Gan Jianping ranked fifth on The Midas List that year.

However, looking back at mid-2019, it can be regarded as the eve of the decline of the consumer Internet era and the beginning of China's entry into the era of technology investment. At that time, to some extent, Gan Jianping's departure was also an adjustment of the Qiming Venture Partners' management to the subsequent investment direction. And at this moment, the change of Nisa Leung seems to imply the end of the fanatical medical investment in the past ten years.

"DarkFlow Waves" once mentioned in "The Big Gamble of Innovative Drugs: A Dream of 200 Billion Yuan Consumed in 4 Years" that the reform of the Drug Administration in 2015 and the 18A New Policy launched by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange three years later (allowing unprofitable biopharmaceutical companies to go public after IPO), medical care, especially innovative drugs, has become the field with the largest financing amount, the highest attention, and the most legendary stories. Capital, entrepreneurs, CROs, and even clinical doctors, almost all participants jointly promoted this wave of enthusiasm.

As one of the big winners among them, Qiming Venture Partners, Nisa Leung has made great contributions.

Nisa Leung grew up in Hong Kong, China, and graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA. Her investment and career began in the United States. She served as an Investment Partner at PacRim Venture Partners in California and also worked at Mobius Venture Capital. In 2003, she returned to China and successively founded three healthcare companies. She joined Qiming Venture Partners in 2006 and later established the medical team.

Many senior investors in the medical industry have expressed their respect and admiration for her. "Nisa has too many beautiful cases, especially Zai Lab." An investor told "DarkFlow Waves". Before Qiming Venture Partners' Series A investment in 2014, the company's valuation was 25 million US dollars, and after the investment, it was about 40 million US dollars, which was not high at that time. And just three years later, Zai Lab went public on the US stock market. In 2020, Zai Lab also went public on the Hong Kong stock market, with a market value peak of nearly 7 billion US dollars.

In 2014, few people really paid attention to drug research and development. Zai Lab only had a small management team composed of three women, and the project was full of uncertainties. For Nisa Leung, evaluating a small team relied on "a lot of intuition" and the calculation of whether it filled the market gap.

And Nisa Leung's decision to invest in Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals against all odds and become the largest investor also resulted in a super deal with a return of over 10 billion yuan.

"The help of Qiming Venture Partners to the company can be written into a book," said Gan Zhongru, the founder of Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals, known as the "Father of Insulin in China". At that time, many people were not optimistic about Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals. Their factory was still small, and they had a patent lawsuit with the multinational pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. And in 2010, they faced a sales bottleneck with no revenue growth for three consecutive years. Due to the not outstanding scale and revenue, Nisa Leung faced many doubts at the project investment decision meeting. But she firmly believed in the development space of the third-generation insulin in the Chinese market and resolutely invested, which led to a super return later.

After investing in Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals, Qiming Venture Partners gradually started investing in the biomedical field, and biomedicine has become the track with the most investment cases, the most concentrated star projects, and the highest rate of return for Qiming.

As we all know, healthcare has long been half of Qiming's business. What impacts will Nisa Leung's departure have?

Hu Xubo, who joined Qiming Venture Partners in 2006 and was promoted to Managing Partner in 2015, has been jointly responsible for the healthcare field with Nisa Leung. Some industry insiders told us that Nisa is familiar with overseas markets and is good at investing in innovative drugs, while Hu is more skilled in medical device and RMB market investment.

Hu Xubo once commented that Nisa Leung is "a very good investor with an international perspective and a strong sense of judgment". "I have learned a lot from Nisa, and I especially admire her sensitivity to the big market and her long-term support for entrepreneurs." Working together for more than ten years, the two know each other well, and the two of them, relying on their different educational backgrounds, work experiences, perspectives and cognitions, have formed a complementarity and synergy in Qiming Venture Partners' medical investment.

In the future, Chen Kan is also one of the successors. Chen Kan went from an undergraduate at Fudan University to a postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. In the early stages of his career, he served as a senior scientist at Johnson & Johnson in the United States, engaged in the research and development of new cancer drugs. Before that, he also served as the team leader at Hengrui Medicine.

Unlike the era of Nisa Leung, the current situation that Chen Kan is facing has also changed: The first wave of "low-hanging fruits" in innovative drugs has been picked. In response to this change, Chen Kan mentioned in one of our interviews, "More innovative technologies in China, such as first-in-class targets, may be the next opportunity. These new targets developed relying on China's clinical resources will be able to have a sufficient impact worldwide in the future."

Even in 2023, when the investment and financing in the entire industry is declining, Qiming Venture Partners has made 47 investments in the healthcare field. From 2022 to May this year, the investee companies of Qiming Venture Partners have completed a total of 19 cross-border BD transactions, with a total amount of more than 8.5 billion US dollars.

According to incomplete statistics, nearly 70 domestic innovative drug license-out transactions occurred in China in 2023, with the disclosed total transaction amount exceeding 40 billion US dollars. It is worth noting that the number of domestic innovative drug license-out varieties exceeded license-in for the first time in 2023, which is a landmark event. Chen Kan believes that now is the best time for China's healthcare companies to embark on globalization.

It is also reported that Qiming Venture Partners is preparing to launch the fundraising of a new fund, with a target size of 800 - 1,000 million US dollars. Duane Kuang will continue to lead the fundraising of the next fund.

In early November, at the Qiming Venture Partners' US dollar LP conference, Nisa Leung, Duane Kuang, Gary Rieschel, Hu Xubo, and Zhou Zhifeng all appeared at the thank-you dinner. Holding a wine glass, Nisa Leung in a red suit, and Qiming Venture Partners are both welcoming a new era.