Anix Lynch

Anix Lynch — partner and co-founder in the Bangkok years (2016–2019). Martin met Anix in 2016, and she was his girlfriend until 2019 — the relationship that frames his post-Narrative chapter in Asia. She came to it as a senior figure in Thai finance: Managing Partner at Expara, the Southeast Asian seed fund backed by the Stock Exchange of Thailand, where she led the launch of the country's first government-backed early-stage VC fund, with a prior track record across BlackRock's real-estate arm and the CP Group family office and a Chicago Booth MBA. crunchbase-com ↗ Expara is where their paths ran together — she on the investment side while Martin was Entrepreneur in Residence in 2017–2018, "an entrepreneur in residence at a Singapore and Bangkok-based VC company" ▶ 2:57 — and she was his co-founder in the fintech he built from Bangkok, European investors meeting Asian real estate, which the two wound down before launch when Thai regulation slipped. breakit-se ↗, breakit-se ↗ Named one of Thailand's top female VCs in 2018 and a fixture on Bangkok's stages, from Startup Grind's Female Leaders Month to Techsauce Global Summit startupgrind-com ↗, she has since rebuilt herself as an applied AI engineer in Los Angeles, with merged contributions to Supabase, LangChain and Feast and more than a hundred Medium articles explaining machine learning. linkedin-com ↗, github-com ↗, medium-com ↗

In Martin's story

• The venture firm. Anix and Martin shared an employer before they shared a company. At Expara, the Singapore- and Bangkok-based seed investor, she sat on the investment side while Martin was Entrepreneur in Residence in 2017–2018 — the stint he sums up as "being entrepreneur in residence at a Singapore and Bangkok-based VC company" ▶ 2:57, and where he picked up his hands-on blockchain experience. ▶ 3:39, ▶ 2:13
• The fintech. She was Martin's co-founder in the venture he built from Bangkok in the months after Narrative's bankruptcy: a platform connecting European investors with Thai real-estate projects, with the tech team in Sweden and finance teams in Bangkok and Tokyo. breakit-se ↗ Martin's own justification for jumping sectors was that "det jag kan är att bygga internationella bolag" — the domain expert could be found. In this case the domain was Asian real-estate finance, and the expert was already on the founding team (see below). When the Thai regulatory framework slipped by a year, the two wound the company down before launch rather than wait. breakit-se ↗
• Bangkok over Singapore. The choice of city followed the growth: "i Singapore tittar många på Bangkok eftersom det är en väldigt stor tillväxttakt här." breakit-se ↗ Four years later Martin filed Bangkok, with New York, under "a bit shorter journeys perhaps." ▶ 9:03

Her own path

Two decades in Asian finance, then a second career built from scratch in AI engineering.

• The investor. Managing Partner at Expara, the Southeast Asian seed fund backed by the Stock Exchange of Thailand and the Thai government, where she led the launch and management of Thailand's first government-backed early-stage VC fund; the Expara Thailand fund is credited to her and Expara's founder Douglas Abrams. Her stated track record is more than two billion dollars across private equity, family-office capital and venture capital in Asia, and her investment focus was fintech, real-estate marketplaces, enterprise SaaS, digital health, IoT and mobile. crunchbase-com ↗, unicorn-nest ↗
• Before venture. Investment Associate at MGPA, the real-estate private-equity arm later folded into BlackRock; Manager at NCC under ING Real Estate; Asset Manager at Capital Realty; and Vice President of Strategy and Business Intelligence at MQDC, the property developer of the Chearavanont family behind CP Group, from 2012 to 2015. crunchbase-com ↗
• Portfolio and boards. Lead investor in Eventbanana and in Ooca, the Thai telemedicine company (Telemedica), with board and advisory roles at Ooca, Eventbanana and Peakengine.com. crunchbase-com ↗, linkedin-com ↗
• Recognition. Named one of Thailand's top female VCs in 2018 and described as one of the country's top ecosystem builders for her work around True Digital Park, the largest science park in Southeast Asia. crunchbase-com ↗
• Stages and classrooms. Guest lecturer in entrepreneurship for the MBA programmes at UNC, Sasin and Chicago Booth. A regular panelist, judge and speaker in the Bangkok ecosystem: Startup Grind Bangkok billed her as one of two "leading venture capitalists" for its Female Leaders Month startupgrind-com ↗; she spoke at Techsauce Global Summit 2018, Southeast Asia's largest tech conference, where she initiated and hosted fifteen stages on FoodTech, AgriTech and BioTech for an audience of more than ten thousand crunchbase-com ↗, linkedin-com ↗; and she sat on the GovTech Mission panel at the Future Innovative Thailand Institute. gozeroshot-dev ↗
• Education. MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2010–2012); BA in International Business from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She holds JLPT N1, the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. crunchbase-com ↗, github-com ↗
• The engineer. Based in Los Angeles today, she describes herself as "ex-VC/GP and operator turned applied AI engineer" who "screened 700+ startups" and now builds "RAG, agent, and data-platform systems that can be evaluated, deployed, and handed to humans safely." The work is public and measured: a healthcare data-and-AI stack on dbt, BigQuery and Vertex AI with every quality gate green, a retrieval pipeline evaluated at 0.97 Ragas faithfulness, an ER-triage agent with acceptance tests and a written postmortem — "proof, not adjectives", as one README puts it. She has had issues and pull requests merged into Supabase, LangChain, Feast and Linear, and holds IBM's Generative AI Engineering and RAG and Agentic AI certificates alongside the DeepLearning.AI and AWS data-engineering track. github-com ↗, gozeroshot-dev ↗
• The writer. On Medium, as "Anix Lynch, MBA, ex-VC", she has published well over a hundred articles that make machine-learning and LLM concepts "visually skimmable with analogy" — confusion matrices, neural-network architectures, Python for finance — beginning in February 2023 with a piece on the eighteen skills ChatGPT still lacked. medium-com ↗

Source: her LinkedIn profile ↗, Crunchbase ↗, GitHub ↗, gozeroshot.dev ↗.

Rhymes

• The fintech's thesis — European money into Asian property — sat squarely on her CV: real-estate private equity at MGPA, ING Real Estate, and strategy for the Chearavanont family's property developer. Martin brought the company-building; she brought the asset class.
• The finance team was to sit in Bangkok and Tokyo. Martin had lived in Tokyo; she had studied in Kyoto and holds the top Japanese-proficiency grade.
• Both crossed the table. He went from founder to Entrepreneur in Residence at a VC and back to founding; she went from general partner, having screened seven hundred startups, to writing the software she wished she had had for diligence.
• Her February 2023 essay on what ChatGPT still could not do landed the same winter Martin started Co-creating with AI and was collecting his first field reports of generative AI in daily life. ▶ 2:21
• "Proof, not adjectives", her rule for a repository, is Martin's rule for a demo: Clone the repo before you believe the demo.

Part of People & Partners — the recurring cast of Martin Källström's story.