Lily Cheng
Founder, Hubel Labs | Board Director, Cathay Pacific | Global Council, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer | Perplexity AI Fellow
Singapore
Overview
Work Experience
Perplexity AI Industry Fellow
2025 - Current
Perplexity is an AI-powered search company founded in 2022 by former engineers from OpenAI, Meta, and Quora. Headquartered in San Francisco, it delivers direct, citation-supported answers to user queries by combining generative AI with real-time web data. As of 2025, Perplexity has over 22 million active users and is valued at up to $18 billion. The company has established partnerships with major technology and enterprise organizations and is recognized for its focus on transparency and multi-model AI integration in search.
Perplexity is an AI-chat-based conversational search engine that delivers answers to questions using language models.
Raised $165,000,000.00 from IVP, Wayra and SoftBank Vision Fund.
Founder
2017
Hubel Labs is a distributed software lab for experimenting and incubating new business ideas which employ state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, including computer vision and natural language processing to solve problems in consumer's lives.
Digital Advisory Board Member, Mars Petcare
2024
Mars Petcare delivers a better world for pets through delivering comprehensive veterinary care, nutrition, breakthrough programs in diagnostics, wearable health monitoring, DNA testing and pet welfare, pet parent platforms. Over 100,000 Mars Petcare Associates, including 12k veterinarians, collectively help pets and their owners, and the pet professionals around them across more than 130 countries.
Mars Petcare is a veterinary health provider with over 2,000 pet hospitals and diagnostic services worldwide.
Independent Non-Executive Director, Chairman of Remuneration Committee, Member of Audit Committee
2024
Cathay Pacific is the flag carrier of Hong Kong operating a fleet of ~230 passenger and cargo aircraft across the Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong Express, Air Hong Kong and Cathay Cargo brands. In 2023, CX carried ~18 million passengers and generated ~HK$95Bn of revenue. CX is a 4-time winner of the Skytrax World's Best Airline award.
Independent Non-Executive Board Director, Remuneration, Nomination & Sustainability Committee Member
2019
Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (HKSE listed: 1929) is one of the largest jewellery companies in the world trading at ~US$20Bn market cap. CTF offers gem-set, gold and platinum products to consumers both online and offline through 5000+ retail outlets across Greater China as well as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and the United States.
Independent Director, Global Council Member, Risk Management & Audit Committee Member
2021
HSF is an elite international law firm with headquarters in London and Sydney with 2500+ lawyers spanning over 25 offices internationally. Its litigation and arbitration practice in particular is widely recognised as a global leader in dispute resolution. HSF formed in 2012 as a two-way merger of Herbert Smith, a member of the Silver Circle of leading UK law firms, and Freehills, one of the Big Six Australian law firms.
Independent Non-Executive Board Director, Remuneration Committee Member
2018 - 2024
Octopus Cards is a pioneer in fintech in Hong Kong with over 32 million active contactless cards in circulation, processing over US$8Bn of digital transactions a year as of 2016 published figures. With recent collaboration with Samsung to launch a smart prepaid mobile wallet as well as Octopus' own NFC-enabled mobile app, the company continues to innovate at the frontier, bringing simplicity and convenience to Hong Kong residents and tourists alike.
Board Advisor
2016 - 2024
HotelBed Group, formed as a merger of three leading players in the B2B travel distribution space in Oct 2017, is now the world's largest bedbank, powering over 40 million hotel room nights a year with and over 8 Billion Euros of transaction volume a year. Backed by private equity firms Cinven, CPPIB and EQT, the company is currently privately held.
Independent Non-Executive Board Director & Corporate Governance Committee Member
2019 - 2024
SUNeVision (SEHK: 1686) is the technology arm of US$35Bn+ parent, Sun Hung Kai Properties (SEHK: 0016). It is the largest data centre provider in Hong Kong offering industry-leading carrier and cloud-neutral data centre services with global top 10 connectivity. We connect providers of telecommunications, cloud, ISP, CDN, OTT from local, China and global with enterprises of different businesses on our Asia leading data centre ecosystem.
Executive MBA Advisory Group Member
2021 - 2024