LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 099

TX Zhuo — Fika Ventures

June 9, 2021

Seed

TX Zhuo joins today to talk about starting Fika with Eva Ho with the goal of giving back to the community.

TX has an amazing story of dropping out of school to start his first business and how his approach to investing is evolving as the venture market evolves.

Full transcript

So happy to be here with my friend TX Zhou today. TX is a partner at Fika, a boutique seed fund investing in data, AI, and automation. TX started Fika after previously being a founding partner at Karlin Ventures and before that at Innovation Endeavors. I'm excited to hear all about that and also his own very impressive founder journey.  Hi,TX. Good to see ya.

Hi, Minnie, thanks so much for having me, it's a real treat to be able to chat with you today. 

Yeah, it's fun to catch up. So let's start with Fika and then let's get some of the basics and then let me jump into all the exciting things about you.

Of course, of course. I started Fika in late 2016, fund one was a $41 million fund. We're based in LA, but an interesting thing is that all of us used to live in San Francisco, so we're all transplants to LA. About 50% of our investments are focused in the Southern California region. We're predominantly a B2B fund. I'd say it's about 60% of our investments, but we cover FinTech and marketplaces as well. We started investing out of our second fund, which is $77 million in late 2019.

Got it. You know, you said B2B, FinTech, and marketplaces. Are there certain areas that you tend to focus on?

I mean, to be honest with you, we used to be generalists across these three sectors that we focus on? But we decided as a team that we needed to go deeper in these three verticals. So right now I cover a lot of our FinTech investments and then within enterprise software, I cover a lot of our horizontal layer. So anything within dev ops dev tools, security will fall under my purview. And Eva tends to cover more of the vertical SAS plays.