From NTU to Silicon Valley: NTU Founders in Life Sciences
This September, NTU Ventures returns to Palo Alto for the second From NTU to Silicon Valley — a fireside conversation and an open-floor networking evening for the Bay Area NTU community.
About NTU Ventures
Founded in late 2024, NTU Ventures is jointly established by National Taiwan University and alumni-led enterprises. We are dedicated to supporting innovative startups founded by NTU students, alumni, and faculty. By investing in the digital economy, deep tech, electronics, and biotech/healthcare (Seed to Series B), we aim to energize the global NTU alumni startup ecosystem.
More information at: https://ntu.vc/
Your Hosts
The evening will be hosted by the leadership team of NTU Ventures, bringing together deep expertise in venture capital and international scaling:
Brandon Chiang (President): A founding partner at Addin Ventures and partner at Blue Magpie Capital. With a background at Cornerstone Ventures and AppWorks, Brandon has helped scale multiple Asian unicorns. An NTU Math and MBA alum, he specializes in AI and B2B SaaS and is a key architect in bridging the Taiwan–U.S. startup ecosystem.
Annie Su (Vice President): A venture professional with a decade of experience across AppWorks, ANIWARE, and PChome. Specializing in strategic M&A and healthtech expansion, Annie holds an MBA from Cambridge Judge Business School and a Finance degree from NTU, where she was also part of the Creativity and Entrepreneurship Program.
The Conversation — What it takes to build a life science company big pharma takes seriously
Two founders. Ten years apart. Both started at National Taiwan University, went to graduate school in the U.S., and stayed to build companies in the Bay Area — one measuring proteins, one designing them. Taudia and DeepSeq.AI are both NTU Ventures portfolio companies in the U.S.
Paul Hung, Co-founder and CEO of Taudia
Paul Hung is a life-science entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling technology companies, including two successful exits. He co-founded CellASIC, a UC Berkeley spin-off that developed the ONIX platform for advanced live-cell imaging. Following the company's acquisition by EMD Millipore in 2012, Paul led its microfluidic cell-culture product development. He later founded COMBiNATi, a digital PCR company acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2021. After the acquisition, he served as General Manager of Thermo Fisher's digital PCR business. Today, Paul is the CEO of Taudia, where he is once again working with the same core team he has collaborated with for more than a decade. Taudia is developing an ultrasensitive, blood-based biomarker testing platform for measuring protein biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Paul holds degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew Chang, Co-founder and CEO of DeepSeq.AI
Originally trained in physics/biophysics, Andrew developed an expertise in protein engineering at Genentech, where he integrated first-principles physical modeling with large-scale biological screening assays. A winner of multiple international machine learning competitions, he has built his career on the conviction that data quality and scale are the ultimate arbiters of AI power. Andrew is recognized as one of the earliest pioneers in protein language modeling using hyperscaled DNA sequencing data. Prior to founding DeepSeq, he held senior engineering and research roles at Synthego and Karius, where he helped establish their foundational AI platforms. Under his leadership, DeepSeq has secured backing from DARPA, NSF, Merck DSS, Illumina Ventures, Stanford StartX, and other prominent institutions to build the next generation of biologics discovery systems.
What we'll talk about
The actual path: from a graduate lab to a first company, and what changes the second and third time
What it looks like from inside an acquirer — Paul spent years at both Millipore and Thermo Fisher after they bought his companies
Choosing where not to compete, and how each of them picked a narrow position against much larger incumbents
What the market gets wrong about their field right now
How a six- or seven-person team earns the trust of the world's largest pharma companies
What the NTU network is actually worth in the U.S. market
Who this is for
NTU alumni in the Bay Area, founders and aspiring founders in life science and deep tech, R&D and platform operators, and investors in the space. Our last event drew ~100 attendees — 57% tech, 30% VC, a quarter of them co-founders.
Agenda
5:00 – 5:15 PM Registration
5:15 – 5:30 PM NTU Ventures Intro — Fostering the Global Alumni Ecosystem
5:30 – 6:30 PM Fireside Chat — NTU Founders in Life Sciences
6:30 – 7:30 PM Open Floor — Networking, Food & Beverages
Food and drinks provided. Registration requires approval — please register with the name you're known by professionally so we can approve quickly.