SV

Sonny Vu

Hardtech entrepreneur, founder whisperer.

Salem, New Hampshire

Invests in

Stages:

  • Min Investment:

    $0.00
  • Max Investment:

    $0.00
  • Target Investment:

    $0.00

Skills

Product Design
Machine Learning
Design Strategy
User Experience
Software Engineering
Strategy
Start-ups
Semiconductors
Materials Science
Power Electronics
Language Teaching
Number Theory

Work Experience

  • Founder

    2016

    Investing in founders of startups that have the potential for positive, planet-level impact. Mostly seed to series A. Themes in materials science, industrial biotech, sensors / semiconductors, enterprise AI, digital health.

2014 - 2023

  • Director (Founder)

    2014 - 2023

    Supported CEO on a variety of strategic, commercial, and operational matters. Company invents and sells lab operations monitoring and analytics tools and services. Supported CEO in raising $60m (Seed, Series Seed, A, B).

2020 - 2023

  • Chief Executive Officer

    2020 - 2023

    Lead efforts to industrialize and bring to market a suite of inventions in materials science, design software, and robotics to automate the production of continuous carbon fiber composite structures. Raised $70m (B Bridge, B1, B2, C, crowd).

2019 - 2022

  • Director (Founder)

    2019 - 2022

    Supported CEO on a variety of strategic, commercial, and operational matters. Company invented and sold products with a novel muscle fitness sensing technology; raised $6.5m (Seed, Series Seed).

2015 - 2018

  • President and CTO, Connected Devices

    2015 - 2018

    Lead product development for connected hardware and software for 14 of Fossil Group's owned and licensed brands. Developed new business for connected devices. Scouted emerging technology. Grew Asia-based engineering, design, and marketing teams. Supported growth of wearables revenue to over $300m annually.

2011 - 2015

  • CEO, Chairman (Founder)

    2011 - 2015

    Lead brand / product design (wearables and smart home), marketing, sales; oversaw technical development. Recruited leadership and key team members. Raised $65m (Seed, A, B, C, other). Acquired by Fossil Group in 2015 for $260m.

2001 - 2011

  • CEO, Chairman (Founder)

    2001 - 2011

    Chairman (2005 - 2011): Secured long-term deals and partnerships with Sanofi and Apple, raised $25m (Series C). Designed and implemented digital health strategy; drove product, including the award-winning iBGStar, the world's first iPhone-connected hardware med device. CEO (2001 - 2005): Recruited core teams, drove product strategy/design, helped establish key supplier partnerships, got customers for first $20M+ revenue, raised $22m (Seed, A, B).

FireSpout

1999 - 2001

  • CTO (Founder)

    1999 - 2001

    Lead R&D of natural language processing and machine learning technology for autosummarization and unstructured text search applications. Recruited key technical staff. Raised $8m in venture capital in two rounds. Acquired by AskJeeves (now Ask.com) in 2001.

1999 - 1999

  • Researcher

    1999 - 1999

    Did research in Chinese natural language processing and statistical language modeling for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and parsing applications.