Kyle Tsai
Investment Manager at Wayra UK
London, England
Overview
Work Experience
Investment Manager - Wayra Capital
2025 - Current
Europe & LATAM’s largest corporate venture capital funds, with €233M total investment, 500+ global portfolio companies, and 12 FoF investments. Financial growth-stage investment (fund, €5k-10M ticket in Series A onwards startups) • Managed Telefónica’s FoF strategy, overseeing relationships with funds where Telefónica is an LP. • Seconded to Leadwind, a €255M fund co-managed with KFund, acting as the primary liaison to support full-cycle growth stage investments across Southern Europe, LATAM, and other global regions.
Investment Manager - Wayra Ventures
2023 - 2025
Strategic early-stage investment (balance sheet, €100k-6M ticket size in Seed to Series B startups) • Led and managed investments from sourcing, due diligence, and portfolios for business development opportunities within Virgin Media, O2, and Telefonica. • Established and orchestrated one of the largest CVC dealflow communities, with 120+ global CVCs across EMEA, NA, and APAC. • Portfolio include ElevanLabs, Perplexity, Telness Tech, AirAlo, CloudNC, Hiya, and Raylo.
Mentor
2023 - 2023
Black Valley is an accelerator that empowers Black talent in tech for inclusive, innovative solutions. • Mentor of Betascore.io (now NDEWO) in the 2023 accelerator program, facilitated fundraising and commercial growth.
Venture Capital Fellow (Class ’22)
2022 - 2022
A ‘unique fast-track MBA for venture capital’ for extraordinary leaders. Included VC is a prestigious venture capital fellowship (<3% acceptance rate) that gives 40 global fellows education and insider access to top VCs and their portfolio companies. Its ultimate goal is to increase diversity and inclusion within the VC ecosystem. Included VC is supported by venture capital partners and sponsors including Creandum, Daphni, European Investment Fund, KAYA VC, K Fund, HSBC Ventures, HV Capital, Mouro Capital, Mangrove Capital, M12, Notion Capital, Seedcamp and Wilson Sonsini. Included VC has been featured by the likes of Forbes, Sky News, CNBC & Business Insider.
Founder (Exited)
2020 - 2022
Alcohonly is Taiwan's first-ever "complete-wine-experience" platform. With 30+ Taiwanese wine selection and consultation services for wine-paring and tasting, we aim to provide a novel data-driven solution for the unstructured wine industry. • Bootstrapped the business by founding and scaling two product lines: Wine e-commerce platform & wine-pairing algorithm. • Collaborated with ten major regional wineries and co-developed 30+ products on the platform, reaching financial breakeven in 5 months. • Built the first wine-pairing AI algorithm with 600k datasets based on users’ taste bud sensitivity and exited to a tier-1 Japanese beer brand.
Product Manager
2020 - 2020
AUK is a leading manufacturer specializing in the design and production of precision connectors and cable assemblies. Positioned within the internal venture team, the focus is on industry transformation and establishing a healthcare business unit (BU) by leveraging existing resource deployment • Build a successful go-to-market plan by actively managing and tracking the comprehensive market and competitor analysis. • Exceled analytic tools on business trends and potential markets for product team evaluation, positioning, and channel strategies. • Focused on the aftermath of the data evaluation, setting metrics for the analysis process, define conversion rate based on the Human Resources funnel.
Business Operation Analyst - Sales Dept./ Finance Dept.
2018 - 2018
Jinpao is a manufacturer specializing in precision engineering solutions, including sheet metal fabrication, machining, and tooling design. Known for its expertise in the aerospace, telecommunications, and healthcare sectors, the company focuses on delivering high-quality, cost-effective products and services. • Renovated manufacturing procedure for precision parts supplying Airbus and Boeing with SAP modulation from data point prospect. • Optimised manufacturing process by building linear regression models between online and offline cross-functional data and worksheets (600k+). • Improved the quality of client orders and analysed manufacturing performance for each customer order with 10+ self-built VBA functions and pivot tables.
Retail Banking Specialist - Retail Bank Dept./ Retail Loan Dept.
2017 - 2017
Huaxing Bank is a regional commercial bank with total assets exceeding 200 billion yuan and net assets nearing 14 billion yuan. • Create application programming interfaces (APIs) as flow plans with artificial intelligence for confronting the on-demand digital banking services.