KPCB China’s Tina Ju launches new fund under TDF banner

While Ju is described on KPCB's website as founding and managing partner of KPCB China and TDF Capital, a source familiar with the situation says the new vehicle is being marketed as TDF's third fund. She is working with Frank Wang, who was at KPCB until 2009, when he joined Morgan Creek.

Negotiations are underway with a US-based fund-of-funds about coming in as an anchor investor for the new vehicle. A first close is expected in January 2015. TDF will deploy 80% of the corpus into direct transactions, with the remainder to be used to support several incubation funds that make pre-Series A round investments.

Ju began her career in venture capital with VTDF in 1999 and went on to set up VTDF China in 2000 and TDF Capital in 2005. Since 2000, she has led more than 30 investments, including Alibaba Group, Baidu, China Auto Rental, Focus Media and Hurray Holdings.

TDF raised $33 million for its debut fund in 2000 and followed up with a $130 million vehicle five years later. In 2007, TDF's partners - Ju, David Su and Forrest Zhong - joined forces with Joe Zhou, formerly of the SoftBank Asia Infrastructure Fund (SAIF), to raise a China fund under the KPCB banner. Ju and Zhou were joint leaders of KPCB China.

The first fund, targeting technology, internet, media and wireless communications investments, reached a final close of $360 million in 2008. A debut renminbi-denominated fund of RMB380 million ($62 million) came in 2010 and a second US dollar fund worth $250 million closed the following year.

By this point, the original KPCB China team had begun to break up. Zhou departed in 2008 to set up Keytone Ventures, raising $200 million for his debut fund. Zhong left in 2011 and formed South River Capital Partners, which currently manages a RMB2.2 billion fund.

The managing partners for KPCB's second China fund were Ju, Wei Zhou and James Huang, who joined from life sciences-focused Vivo Ventures.

Earlier this year KPCB and its partner, Sherpalo Ventures, decided to withdraw from India and re-focus on the US. Sandeep Murthy, who had been managing investments on behalf of KPCB and Sherpalo since 2005, formed Lightbox and acquired the existing portfolio with backing from a group of secondary investors. The firm then raised $100 million for fresh investments from a different set of LPs.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Greater China
• KPCB China Management
• China
• Fundraising
• Tina Ju
• TDF Capital