What Would Qiming Venture Partners Look Like Without Nisa Leung?

By Qian Ren

Edited by Zhiyan Chen

After weeks of speculation, the management shuffle at Qiming Venture Partners is finally taking shape. According to ChinaVenture, Nisa Leung, a managing partner who has spent 18 years at the firm, is set to depart. Under its "ten-year succession plan," Duane Kuang, also a managing partner, will gradually step back in the coming years.

The new core leadership trio comprises three people: Xubo Hu, promoted to managing partner in July 2015; Zhifeng Zhou, elevated to managing partner in May 2024; and Kan Chen, who became partner in January 2022.

Born in the era of dollar-denominated funds, 18-year-old Qiming Venture Partners has finally reached its coming-of-age moment.

In Qiming's current management structure, Zhou continues to oversee frontier tech investments — a role largely unchanged from before. The biggest shift falls to Chen, who, in addition to his partnership, now serves as co-head of Qiming's healthcare investment team alongside Hu. Chen, a "scientist-turned-investor," had previously been seen as someone Leung mentored.

Investing is ultimately a people business, and partner succession has always been central to an investment firm's brand continuity. China's VC firms have collectively arrived at this juncture. Yet across the broader primary market, few institutions have genuinely achieved a "second-generation transition." In recent years, Kuang has frequently spoken about Qiming's proactive approach to succession planning —

"It's best to build out the organizational pipeline while older, more experienced colleagues are still working hard, rather than scrambling to fill vacancies after the older generation has already checked out," Kuang once told An Yong Waves (暗涌Waves). In a 2023 interview, he also addressed the question of retirement: "When I retire, there won't be a major vacuum at Qiming Venture Partners."

Leung's gradual departure inevitably invites comparisons to JP Gan's exit five years ago: both were star partners on The Midas List, both were names readily associated with Qiming Venture Partners, and both specialized in sectors undergoing inflection points.

In June 2019, the An Yong Waves team exclusively reported that Gan, then a managing partner, was leaving Qiming to launch a new firm (later INCE Capital). At the time, Gan had led Qiming's investments in Bilibili, Dianping, Meitu, and others. Before his departure was announced, he ranked fifth on that year's Midas List.

Looking back, mid-2019 can be seen as both the eve of the consumer internet's decline and the dawn of China's tech investment era. Gan's departure was, in some ways, a strategic adjustment by Qiming's leadership on the firm's future investment direction. Now, Leung's move seems to signal the end of a decade of frenzied healthcare investment.

As An Yong Waves noted in The Innovative Drug Gamble: A 200 Billion Yuan Pipe Dream Over Four Years, the 2015 CFDA reform and the HKEX's 18A rule introduced three years later — allowing unprofitable biotech companies to list — made healthcare, particularly innovative drugs, the sector with the largest funding rounds, highest attention, and most legendary success stories. Capital, entrepreneurs, CROs, and even clinicians collectively fueled this wave.

As one of the biggest winners, Leung deserves much of the credit.

Leung grew up in Hong Kong and holds degrees from Cornell University's School of Management and Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Her investment career began in the US, where she served as investment partner at California-based PacRim Ventures and worked at Mobius Venture Capital. In 2003, she returned to China and founded three healthcare companies in succession. She joined Qiming in 2006 and later built the healthcare team from scratch.

Multiple senior healthcare investors have expressed their respect and admiration for her. "Nisa has so many beautiful deals, especially Zai Lab," one investor told An Yong Waves. Before Qiming's Series A investment in 2014, Zai Lab was valued at $25 million, or roughly $40 million post-money — not particularly high at the time. Just three years later, Zai Lab listed on Nasdaq. It later listed in Hong Kong in 2020, reaching a peak market cap of nearly $7 billion.

In 2014, few were genuinely paying attention to drug R&D. Zai Lab had only a three-woman management team, and the project was fraught with uncertainty. For Leung, evaluating such a small team relied on "a great deal of intuition" and calculations about whether it filled a market gap.

Her decision to push through investment in Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals, becoming its largest investor, also produced a super deal that later generated returns exceeding 10 billion yuan.

Gan Zhongru, founder of Gan & Lee and known as the "Father of Chinese Insulin," once remarked that "Qiming Venture Partners' contribution to the company could fill a book." At the time, many were bearish on Gan & Lee: its factory was small, it had a patent dispute with multinational Eli Lilly, and in 2010 it faced three consecutive years of flat revenue. Given its modest scale and revenue, Leung faced considerable skepticism at the investment committee. But she was convinced of the market potential for third-generation insulin in China and insisted on the investment, paving the way for outsized returns.

Following the Gan & Lee investment, Qiming's biopharma investments gradually expanded, and biopharma became the firm's most prolific, star-studded, and highest-returning sector.

Healthcare has long been Qiming's "half the kingdom." What impact will Leung's departure have?

Xubo Hu, who joined Qiming in 2006 and was promoted to managing partner in 2015, has co-led healthcare with Leung. Industry sources tell us that Leung knows overseas markets and excels at innovative drug investing, while Hu is stronger in medical devices and RMB-market investments. Hu has described Leung as "an excellent investor with international vision and strong judgment." "I've learned so much from Nisa, especially her sensitivity to large markets and her long-term support for entrepreneurs." Having worked together for over a decade, the two developed a complementary and collaborative dynamic in Qiming's healthcare investing, drawing on their different educational backgrounds, professional experiences, perspectives, and insights.

Going forward, Chen is also among the successors. Chen's academic path ran from Fudan University undergraduate to postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Early in his career, he was a senior scientist at Johnson & Johnson in the US, working on oncology drug development. Before that, he was a team leader at Hengrui Medicine.

Unlike in Leung's era, the landscape Chen now faces has fundamentally changed: the "low-hanging fruit" of innovative drugs has already been picked. Addressing this shift, Chen noted in an interview with us that "more innovative Chinese technologies, such as first-in-class targets, may represent the next opportunity. These new targets developed using China's clinical resources could eventually exert significant global influence."

Even amid the industry-wide funding downturn in 2023, Qiming made 47 investments in healthcare. From 2022 through May this year, Qiming portfolio companies completed 19 cross-border BD transactions with total value exceeding $8.5 billion.

According to incomplete statistics, nearly 70 domestic innovative drug license-out transactions occurred in China in 2023, with disclosed total transaction value exceeding $40 billion. Notably, 2023 marked the first year that the number of domestic innovative drug license-out deals surpassed license-ins — a milestone. Chen believes now is the best time for Chinese healthcare companies to go global.

Additionally, Qiming Venture Partners is reportedly preparing to raise a new fund with a target size of $800 million to $1 billion. Kuang will continue to lead fundraising for the next fund.

In early November, at Qiming's USD LP meeting, Leung appeared alongside Kuang, Gary Rieschel, Hu, and Zhou at the appreciation dinner. Glass in hand, Nisa Leung in her red suit — and Qiming Venture Partners — were both welcoming a new era.

Image source: IC Photo