Lake Dai

Lake Dai is Founder, Managing Partner at Sancus Ventures. She is a seasoned venture investor with over 10 years of experience and a track record of successful exits. She is also a highly rated Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has been teaching Applied AI at the Master of Engineering program since 2016.

Lake has a strong background in product and engineering, having worked as an early employee and product engineering executive at Alibaba, where she was employee #84 and Head of Product, as well as at Yahoo!, Overture, and various Silicon Valley tech startups. She played a key role in building Alibaba's B2B marketplace from the ground up. Lake has invested and served on the boards of various AI startups. She is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee and the Lab & Research Committee at GIA, a leading organization for gem and jewelry research, education, and laboratory services in the world. In these roles, she utilizes her expertise in technology to help GIA pursue initiatives such as implementing computer vision for gem certification and utilizing blockchain for diamond tracing.

Lake is dedicated to making a positive impact in the tech industry and is involved in several non-profit organizations. She serves as Chairwoman of HYSTA, one of the largest non-profit organizations empowering Chinese American tech founders, and is a member of the executive team of Stanford Women on Boards, leading the technology experience group. Lake holds an MBA from the University of Southern California, a B.S. in Economics from Beijing International Studies University, and has studied in the Computer Science MS program at Stanford University. She is the inventor of 5 U.S. patents in search algorithms, recommendation algorithms, and text tokenization.