Tick Jiang — Melbourne

Self-taught.
Solo founder.
Still learning.

Five years ago Tick Jiang couldn't write code. Today she is the technical co-founder of NUVC — an 8-agent AI platform for venture capital intelligence, built from scratch in Melbourne, with co-founder Duan Duan leading brand, creative, and design.

The Origin

Five years ago, Tick was an investor and connector — comfortable in capital markets, cross-border deals, and community building. She was not technical. She could not write code. She had never built software.

Then she started asking a question she couldn't answer from the outside: why does the VC system give brilliant founders such poor-quality feedback? Why does conviction — the signal every experienced investor says matters most — get systematically underweighted in the data? Why does the whole industry repeat the same mistakes across cycles?

She decided to build the answer. Not find it. Build it.

Over the next five years, she taught herself Python, backend architecture, API design, database engineering, full-stack development, LLM integration, and AI agent orchestration. Not from a bootcamp. From the problem — learning each layer as the system demanded it.

The result is NUVC: an 8-agent AI pipeline with 13 intelligence layers, a multi-signal scoring engine calibrated against 172 real VC investment memos and validated on 85 known-outcome companies. Tick built the entire technical system. Co-founder Duan Duan built the brand around it.

What Building Taught Her

You can't understand a system from the outside. You have to build inside it before the real questions become visible.

— Tick Jiang

Building NUVC produced findings Tick didn't expect. After scoring 673+ pitch decks and analyzing 172 real VC investment memos, the empirical data challenged what she had believed as an investor:

Product execution outpredicts team

In document-based VC assessment, product execution is the strongest predictor of expert judgment — r²=0.77, versus 0.49 for team quality. The industry spends most of its time on the wrong signal.

Conviction is systematically underweighted

Conviction has the highest correlation with investment outcomes (r=0.598), yet most structured decision frameworks weight it at roughly 10%. The most important signal is the most ignored.

Three academic papers drawing on this research are targeting ICAIF 2026, FAccT 2027, and AAAI 2027, with CSIRO collaboration briefs prepared.

She also serves as an Advisor to the Victorian Government on technology and multicultural innovation — working on how AI systems can be both genuinely useful and structurally accountable.

The Platform

NUVC (nuvc.ai) is the infrastructure she built to answer the questions she couldn't answer as an investor.

AI agents in the pipeline

named intelligence layers

7,900+

verified investors across 35 countries

60s

to score a pitch deck, with explainable feedback

673+

pitch decks scored in research corpus

172

real VC deal memos in calibration dataset

The platform serves founders, emerging VC fund managers, and family offices — four products from a single AI engine. Tick built the technical architecture. Co-founder Duan Duan leads brand, creative, design, and marketing. Built in Melbourne.