Investment Director at AppWorks
Check size: Firm-level: AppWorks publishes a US$200K to US$15M per-deal range across Seed through Series C, with capacity to lead or follow and reserve capital for follow-ons. This is not Ching's personal allocation range.
Ching backs global Web3 founders and infrastructure that can make decentralized systems useful, secure, and accessible at scale. Her work emphasizes founder vision, determination, domain expertise, and execution; practical user pain; transparent and non-custodial architecture; and businesses that earn trust through real adoption rather than token narratives alone.
Explain the indispensable user or protocol problem, why decentralization is necessary, who retains custody and control, and how security, transparency, governance, and risk management work. Show live adoption, repeatable usage, unit economics or protocol value capture, founder-domain expertise, and a plan to bridge global infrastructure with Asian developer and customer ecosystems.
Curious, mission-driven founders with vision, determination, execution ability, and deep expertise in both the problem domain and decentralized systems. She enjoys working directly with founders on strategy and fundraising and has said she believes blockchain protocols, DAOs, and companies can create meaningful societal change.
No explicit personal pass list is public. Her investment writing implies weaker fit for custodial or opaque systems that erode user control, projects without a critical customer problem, teams unable to execute through volatile cycles, and speculative Web3 concepts without defensible infrastructure, trust, or sustained usage.
Test whether decentralization materially improves user control, transparency, security, or interoperability; then require real usage, an executable risk model, and value capture that does not depend solely on speculation.
Begin with the unmet user need and desired behavior, then evaluate whether a blockchain or protocol is the best enabling architecture rather than treating the technology itself as the customer value proposition.
“At AppWorks, we seek founders with the vision, determination, and execution ability to address critical challenges in their fields.”
— https://appworks.tw/why-we-invested-marcelo-ruiz-de-olano-the-visionary-behind-karpatkey/
Transparent, non-custodial treasury infrastructure with automated risk tooling can give DAOs institutional-grade financial management without removing control from asset owners.
Curiosity and sustained proximity to founders made it possible to build AppWorks' Web3 practice while preserving its north star of helping founders become better founders.
Start with an unmet user need, test whether the product and business model solve it, and let user evidence—not technical enthusiasm alone—drive the path to product-market fit.
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