FINIAN TAN

Tan took the long way to venture capital. He started at Shell in Singapore and rose to chief trader at Shell Japan.

Then he moved to J. Aron, the Goldman Sachs commodities arm, where he became regional director and head of Asia-Pacific.

In 1997, at 34, he joined Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry as Deputy Secretary. There he chaired the Technopreneurship Investment Fund, a US$1 billion push to build a startup scene from scratch.

In 2000 he crossed over to Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet as its founding partner for Asia, and made the Baidu bet. In 2002 he became head of Credit Suisse First Boston's banks in Singapore and Malaysia.

In 2005 he co-founded Vickers Venture Partners and has chaired it since.

Vickers is Finian Tan's firm, and it hunts differently from most. It goes global and it goes deep, backing hard science as much as software.

Its biggest winner on paper is Samumed, a San Diego regenerative medicine company Vickers first backed in 2012. It was valued around $12 billion in 2018 and renamed itself Biosplice in 2021.

Tan also chairs Matchmove, a payments platform, and co-founded Entomo, the software company behind Malaysia's MySejahtera contact-tracing app. Before Vickers, his defining move was Baidu, made while he was at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet.

That one deal set the standard for everything after.

Tan likes hard problems with patents on them. His rule is simple.

If a company has patentable technology, it is easier to win, because rivals cannot just copy it. Without that, all you have is a head start, and head starts get erased.

He also splits risk into pieces. Over the years Vickers stopped taking on technology risk and demand risk at the same time, and he says the failure rate dropped once they did.

In plain English, he bets on science that works and on markets that clearly want it, not on hope.

Baidu, and it is not close. In 2000, at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet, Tan led a $7.5 million investment for about 25% of Baidu, plus two board seats.

The timing looked insane. The dot-com bubble was bursting and nobody wanted internet stocks.

But Tan bet that what worked in the US, a dominant search engine, would repeat in China. He was right.

Baidu became China's Google and went public in 2005 in one of the hottest IPOs of the decade. The stake turned into a fortune and made his name across Asia.

The one that stings is a fraud. Between October 2020 and January 2021, Tan handed US$19.2 million (about S$25.6 million) to Envy Global Trading, the nickel trader run by Ng Yu Zhi.

Prosecutors say no nickel was ever bought, and that the scheme took in about S$1.46 billion from 947 investors. In court in April 2025 Tan admitted he had been sold on the story for months.

Ng has been on trial on 42 charges since November 2024. The other shadow is Baidu itself.

Every fund he raises gets measured against it. Samumed, the paper star of Vickers, also shows the risk of his style.

It was valued around $12 billion, then two Phase 3 knee osteoarthritis trials failed. As Biosplice it ran another trial and filed for FDA approval in January 2026.

A huge markup is a promise, not a result.

Tan's rules are shaped by both a trading floor and a science lab. Rule one, demand a clear path to profit, or walk away.

Rule two, prefer companies with real, patentable technology, because a patent is a wall competitors cannot climb. Rule three, do not stack risks.

Take on the technology risk or the market risk, but try not to bet on both being solved at once. Rule four, go global, because the next Baidu could be anywhere and a fund stuck in one city will miss it.

Underneath all of it is a trader's respect for odds.

Tan is Singaporean and goes by Dr Finian Tan, for the Cambridge doctorate. He has four children.

Vickers is partly a family affair. His brother, Dr Damian Tan, heads the firm's Kuala Lumpur office.

Beyond that he keeps his family life out of the press. What comes through in interviews is a competitive streak.

He genuinely enjoys being the person who saw the big thing before everyone else did.

Tan went through Singapore Polytechnic and the University of Glasgow, then earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge, studying how repeated loading affects soil and buildings. He did it on a Royal Dutch Shell scholarship, which is how he ended up at Shell afterwards.

He trained as a civil engineer, and the science habit stuck. It is part of why Vickers is comfortable betting on regenerative medicine and hard technology that scares generalist investors away.

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