PR Yu is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur living in the Silicon Valley. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of Yu Galaxy, and was the co-Founder and Managing Partner of SV Tech Ventures. His teams have invested in over 100 startups in a variety of industries, many of which have successfully IPO’ed or been acquired. PR was on the board of more than a dozen companies.
Before becoming an investor, PR was a serial entrepreneur. He started his first company while he was a graduate student in Colorado. After graduate, he moved to the Silicon Valley and became one of the first few employees of Innovalight, which was later acquired by DuPont. As the Founder & CEO of Optony, he grew and expanded its clean energy business to five offices in two countries.
PR has also devoted efforts to education and other non-profit sectors. As the Chairman of the first Solar Decathlon in Asia, he organized 23 teams from 13 countries to design, build and compete on energy-efficient buildings. He was a part-time research professor at Peking University, a longtime industry mentor for the Schwarzman College, and an external advisor for research and innovation of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In his early career as a researcher in places such as the National Renewable Energy Lab, PR has published more than 30 patents and peer-reviewed papers, which were cited 5000+ times.
PR has obtained his B.S. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder.