Meet the geeks

Ming Yeh, managing partner, CSC Upshot Ventures

Ming Yeh is a successful entrepreneur experienced in building companies and cross functional teams in Asia and U.S. She is also a founder of several early-stage venture capital funds. She founded Upshot Ventures in 2015, launched the firm’s first fund, CSC Upshot, in close partnership with AngelList. It defined a new model of venture investing, combining large-scale intelligent data analysis with unique deal access to deliver superior risk-adjusted early-stage returns. The fund invested in enterprise software, AI enabled and Fintech sectors. It seeded over 30 unicorns from their earliest stages, including Boom Supersonic, Notion, Rippling, Cruise (exited) and Flexport (exited). Continuing the success of the first fund, Ming launched her second fund under Upshot Ventures in mid-2022, whose portfolio includes Hourly, HoneyBricks and others.

Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Ming started her career as a physicist and an electrical engineer, spending a decade designing microprocessors at various technology companies. As an engineer, she learned the pure joy of designing and building products from the ground up, creating three U.S. patents for innovations in computer architecture. She was then able to bring that joy to her role as a venture investor. In building a life deeply committed to facilitating relationships between U.S. and Asia, Ming moved her family to Shanghai for six years in 2008. During that time, she headed up SVB Capital Asia, building SVB’s Asia presence from zero to US$150 million under management and opening its Beijing and Hong Kong offices.

As a woman entrepreneur, Ming is passionately committed to the cause of women leadership in business and the next generation women leaders. She is on the Business Leadership Council for Wellesley College, her alma mater. She co-founded the organization Women In Leadership in China to help raise awareness among business leaders, and raised funding to support education for girls from rural areas of China.

Ming has a 16-year-old daughter who currently attends Castilleja School in Palo Alto. Her husband, Sherman Chu, is a Deputy General Counsel at Arista Networks. Ming has a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Wellesley College, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from USC and a master’s degree in Business Administration from MIT Sloan School of Management.