GGV Capital Brings On Early Xiaomi-Backer Hans Tung As Their Newest Partner

GGV Capital, a cross-border venture capital firm that focuses on China and U.S., is bringing on its sixth general partner through hiring Hans Tung from Qiming Ventures.

He’s a VC that made an early bet in Xiaomi, a Chinese handset maker that piggy-backed off the Android ecosystem to build a business that was most recently valued at $10 billion.

The firm and Tung have known each for about eight years as he built up a name in mainland China, through involvements in companies like online clothing retailer Vancl.com and Forgame, a cloud-based game developer that just went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with a market cap of more than $1 billion. Before he was at Qiming, he did a stint at Bessemer Venture Partners, worked as a financial analyst for Merrill Lynch and started two companies.

He’ll be based in Silicon Valley, but will be commuting a lot back and forth between China and the U.S.

“I’m seeing convergence between the two markets,” he said, pointing to examples like Xiaomi’s effort to build its brand outside of mainland China and in how Western companies have adopted virtual transactions techniques from Asia.

(It’s a bit of a counter-intuitive thing to say given how silo-ed the Chinese consumer Internet and mobile markets have been from the West. That’s because of government regulations that have made it difficult for Western companies to even enter or gain market share in China and cultural and language barriers.)

GGV has been around since 2000, has $1.6 billion under management and has seen 16 IPOs across its portfolio including YY. They were also one of the first investors in Alibaba, the e-commerce giant that is anticipated to have one of the tech industry’s largest ever IPOs in the near future.

They’ve also backed Western companies like Pandora Media, Buddy Media, Square and SoundCloud.

“GGV is a single fund that invests across the world’s two biggest geographies,” Tung said.