Darren Wang – Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor

Darren Wang is a Taiwanese angel investor and the founder and chairman of OwlTing Group, a leading global blockchain company with a strong focus on e-commerce and applications. He is known for his entrepreneurial skills and is highly experienced in mobile advertising and e-commerce. 

With a strong belief in turning ideas into real products, Darren Wang founded OwlTing and OBOOK, his two main investments. Since 2010 he has served as chairman of the board of OwlTing. The target markets Wang is interested in are e-books, social media, private social networking, mobile advertising, digital payments and location-based services. Wang relies on blockchain technology as the building block of most of the ventures he is involved with. 

Location

Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Darren Wang completed his basic education, after which he enrolled at the National Taiwan University in 1997. He studied Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering and graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science degree. While attending the university, Wang was the president of the National Taiwan University Symphony orchestra and founded the Campus Movie Festival. After graduation, he decided to move abroad to the United States where he spent some time working at Google, Cyworld US and Cywee Group. To further his education, Wang enrolled at the Boston University College of Engineering in 2004 where he achieved a Master of Science degree in computer system engineering. After moving back to Taiwan, Wang launched his entrepreneurial ventures and started making investments locally as well as abroad in the United States where he is particularly focused on Silicon Valley, Boston and New York. Wang speaks Taiwanese, Chinese and English. 

Remarkable Investments

Some of Darren Wang’s most significant investments are:

• OBOOK – OBOOK is a book app with over a million Chinese titles. It’s the top-ranked book app in the Taiwan Apple App Store.
• OwlTing – Known as an AirBnb for global merchants, OwlTing combines social media with online travel and mobile commerce. The company head office is in Taiwan and it has branches in Malaysia, the US and Japan.
• MaiCoin – A Taiwan-based cryptocurrency merchant service with the goal of addressing the untapped Asian markets. 
• CoolBitX Technology – The developer of CoolWallet, a Bitcoin hardware wallet known for its convenience. 
• BlockSeer – Located in the US, BlockSeer uses AI, Big Data and blockchain technology to offer a platform that enables transactions and applications in a decentralised setting. 

Latest News

After the Web in Travel (WiT) Bootcamp held in Singapore, WiT published an article in November 2018 about the challenges experienced by startups in Asia. Darren Wang spoke at the event and expressed his views about raising funding for blockchain projects in a market where people don’t understand what blockchain technology is. According to Wang, this is the reason why the company does not have any investors from Taiwan. In May 2018 Global Newswire announced that Wang’s company OwlTing received a significant investment from SBI Group with the understanding that the funding would accelerate its international expansion strategy.