William Bao Bean

Summary

William is Managing General Partner of Orbit Startups the longest running emerging market startup program with over US$125m in investment value managed. Orbit invests in startups with technology that drives impact in digitizing traditional industries, economic independencesustainability and including ecommerce, fintech, travel, media, health, education, and logistics across emerging and frontier markets in Asia, Middle East, Africa and LATAM. Orbit provides hands-on support for cross border expansion, user acquisition, sales, partnerships, and fundraising. Orbit has helped its startups scale to 171m monthly active users as of 1Q25 via the Orbit ecosystem. William joined Orbit from SingTel Innov8 Ventures where he was a founding Managing Director. Prior to that William was a Partner at Softbank China & India, a VC backed by Softbank and Cisco, leading investments across Asia. William started his career in equity research most recently with Deutsche Bank where he was an Institutional Investor Asia top ranked analyst for Internet and Software including the IPOs for Alibaba, Kingsoft, eLong (Expedia), OnMobile and Infoedge Naukri. William was ranked #3 stock picker in Hong Kong/China and #1 for Technology, Media and Telecom by Thomson Reuters Starmine as well as #3 equity research analyst in Asia for Software and IT Services by Institutional Investor Magazine. William has done over 350 early stage investments including Bitmex in blockchain, UShopal in ecommerce, italki in edtech, Videoverse in AI, Carota in mobility, Flickstree in media, ELSA Speak in edtech, Tappytoon in media, Coutloot in ecommerce, and Dastgyr in fintech. He currently is a Director or Observer on the boards of Supplynote, Scantrust, Boost Capital, Pandabus, Fleksy, Goama, and italki as well as Blair Academy. He holds a BA from Bowdoin College.