Samsung NEXT Ventures

David Lee heads Samsung NEXT as the most senior investment professional. A managing director, Raymond Liao, and investment director Andy Duong support him alongside a compact team of investors and venture-operations staff. The firm operates without a formal investment committee, pushing decision rights down to the investment team to accelerate deal execution.

The firm positions itself as a strategic guide to Samsung's wider ecosystem, leveraging the parent company's business units to identify startups that can benefit from a commercial partnership. Because follow-on capital is reserved for situations where a clear, high-impact collaboration emerges, the sourcing model effectively screens for companies that Samsung's operating divisions are willing to sponsor internally.

It rarely does either. The firm explicitly describes itself as a minority, non-lead investor, typically participating in syndicates alongside other venture firms. Taking a board seat or leading a deal is the exception, consistent with its posture as a strategic co-investor rather than a full-lifecycle venture partner.

It invests across all stages, from seed rounds to late-stage growth, with check sizes that range from $50,000 to $25 million. The firm adjusts its commitment to match the specific needs of each team, not a fixed fund-size formula or stage-specific allocation.

Follow-on decisions are not tied to pro-rata rights. Instead, the firm invests more only when a high-impact commercial opportunity emerges that benefits both the portfolio company and Samsung. If no partnership materializes, the firm may not follow on even if a pro-rata allocation technically exists.

The firm does not publish a list of excluded sectors. Its website focuses on four broad areas—artificial intelligence and intelligent machines, healthtech, consumer services, and frontier technology—suggesting that deals outside those domains face a higher bar, though the firm says it invests opportunistically in founders pursuing the imagined and impossible.

Samsung NEXT Ventures sits inside the broader Samsung NEXT initiative, which spans venture investing, partnerships, and internal innovation projects. The venture team handles early- and growth-stage equity deals, while other parts of Samsung NEXT focus on M&A, internal R&D, and ecosystem development, all feeding into the parent company's product and services roadmap.