Venture Insights with Foothill Ventures

This is your chance to sit down with a deep-tech investor who's been on both sides of the table — as a builder and as a backer.

Dr. Xuhui Shao is a Founding Partner of Foothill Ventures, an early-stage deep-tech venture fund based in Silicon Valley. Foothill backs exceptional founders building highly differentiated products with real technical moat — and Xuhui brings a rare operator's lens to every investment, having spent decades building and scaling some of the most technically complex platforms in the industry.

What Foothill Ventures looks for:

Stage: Seed (primary) and Series A (typically as a follow-on check)

Check size: $1.5M

Investment thesis: Exceptional founders building highly differentiated products with a real technical moat

Before Foothill, Xuhui was VP-II Engineering at Yahoo, leading their global display ads platforms, and was a founding technologist at two landmark Ad Tech companies — Turn (acquired for $310M) and ID Analytics (acquired for $170M). He's also an early investor in Plus.AI, Weride.AI, and Certik, all of which went on to become unicorns. He holds a BS and MS from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of Minnesota.

This is a members-only session. Come with your questions about deep-tech investing, what it takes to build a real technical moat, or whether your company fits Foothill's thesis.