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Whether building a business or selling a start-up, Li Wen Chi has been there, done that and got the t-shirt.
Today however, the iconic crew neck attire has returned… all black with a striking company logo painted on the front, wrapped up in a light blazer.
Wearing the uniform of a unicorn chaser, this represents second time around for a now serial entrepreneur.
“We partner with visionary entrepreneurs and emerging and growth companies to realise ambitious visions,” said Li Wen Chi, Co-Founder and Director of Hoshi Tech Venture.
Li Wen Chi (Hoshi Tech Venture / Rafay)
Now loaded and launched, Hoshi goes to market as an advisory firm specialising in helping founders incubate and scale technology start-ups and growth companies across Asia.
This draws on more than 10 years as a company founder for Wen Chi, having built InfoFabrica from the ground up in 2013 – a consulting and managed service provider (MSP) that housed deep expertise across hybrid cloud.
As a certified cloud partner of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and IBM Cloud in ASEAN, the business was eventually acquired and combined with Cloud Kinetics by I Squared Capital in 2020.
“Leveraging our deep expertise in the technology sector and Asia market, Hoshi delivers the strategic guidance, expert execution and sound investments needed to bring innovative visions to life,” Wen Chi added.
The motivation behind the launch is to help founders “distinguish” and “differentiate” in a highly competitive landscape.
Armed with the lessons learned from his own venture, Wen Chi is helping start-ups navigate the challenges of building a business from a blank canvas – powered by his sharpened vision, invaluable hindsight and seasoned mindset.
For many founders, the first venture is a crash course in resilience, strategy and market adaptation. Hoshi is where experience meets ambition, allowing for a more refined and confident approach to business building.
“We are built on a foundation of innovation and strategic expertise,” Wen Chi shared. “We understand the unique challenges businesses face at every growth stage, from emerging to growth companies.”
Key clients include leaders in the provision of cloud-based technologies and managed services, in addition to deep expertise in the data centre, DevOps and platform engineering product sets. An early move into artificial intelligence (AI) and GenAI has also been a natural progression in response to increased market demand.
Key partnerships in the technology space include:
Start-ups: Accelerating growth through bespoke advisory services
M&A: Aligning long-term strategic goals with M&A execution plans
MSP Transformation: Guidance on business model transformation and next-generation commercial structures
AI and Cloud: Scaling businesses and operations with results-driven outcomes
Implementation: From recommendation and advisory to full-scale deployment and integration
“We work closely with firms that provide the foundational technologies and services necessary for advanced digital operations and tech-enabled business solutions,” Wen Chi shared.
Geographically speaking, Hoshi’s presence spans Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, plus Vietnam, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Accelerating Rafay across Asia
A key component of the Hoshi business model is to launch and scale new partnerships in the region, super-charged by more than a decade of start-up wisdom garnered by Wen Chi.
Hence the launch of a joint venture with Rafay Systems in Asia Pacific, a specialist in “empowering and simplifying innovation” in AI clouds and cloud native platforms.
Operating as a Series B technology start-up, the US-based software vendor delivers enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities for modern infrastructure and accelerated computing.
The platform is leveraged via an as-a-service model for developers and data scientists seeking to deploy CPU-based and GPU-based workloads in data centres, public clouds, or at the edge. This specialisation also extends to Nvidia Cloud Partners (NCPs).
“A technology gap exists in the Nvidia cloud partner technology stack – at the orchestration layer,” Wen Chi explained. “Our top priority in Asia is to use the Rafay platform to empower Nvidia capabilities to convert GPU investments into GPU clouds and AI sovereign clouds to capture enterprise market demand.”
Taking a lead role helping NCPs build GPU cloud credentials, Rafay jointly developed PaaS reference architecture with Nvidia to help accelerate adoption via the partner ecosystem.
“In the short-term, we plan to engage all NCPs in the region to enable the channel to build new AI capabilities in more efficient and agile ways,” Wen Chi added.
“The aim is to provide a cloud-like experience for end-users through self-service GPU consumption. This will be supported by GenAI training, fine-tuning and inferencing plus multi-tenant clusters, one-click machine learning workbenches and on-demand secure workplaces.”
According to Deloitte findings, AI investment in Asia Pacific is expected to surge five-fold to $117 billion in USD by 2030. This underscores an urgent imperative – organisations must establish robust governance frameworks to unlock AI’s full potential responsibly.
“Businesses in Asia are prioritising the investment of AI and GenAI to remain competitive and innovative,” Wen Chi observed. “There is a strong motivation to ensure organisations do not fall behind the AI trend and keep pace as the industry evolves.
“But while this remains a hot topic, companies still require guidance on where and how to invest strategically in this space. Most are exploring the use of AI to generate new revenue streams or new business models.”
To help businesses maximise the benefits of AI, Wen Chi has recruited Dennis Goh as Managing Director to spearhead day-to-day operations at Rafay. Goh joins from AWS and previously held senior management positions at NEC.
“We are actively looking for AI, GenAI and Kubernetes expertise to supplement the team from a solutions and implementation standpoint,” Wen Chi added. “We are motivated to increase the levels of expertise within the ecosystem by creating channel and partner networks that are enabled at pre- and post-engineer positions.
“We’ll support that through the establishment of a digital academy and AI training arm for educational institutions to train students and customise curriculum. We’ll also explore acquisitions to quickly scale our AI and GenAI expertise in Asia.”
