Ernestine Fu

Ernestine Fu is a Venture Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, where she has guided founders as they navigate the journey to product-market fit and scale their businesses and teams. To develop an investment thesis in commercializing university research, she supervised the firm’s campus associate program, recruiting talent at colleges ranging from UC Berkeley to UT Austin. Over the past decade, she has worked across the startup ecosystem, from negotiating 400-page merger agreements, to organizing SPVs for later-stage companies, to angel investing in and advising companies that have since been acquired, to advising banks on venture debt. 

Combining a business background with engineering research and focus on emerging technologies, Ernestine has authored numerous publications ranging from autonomous vehicles to renewable energy. A champion of connected cars and smart cities, she programmed a full-vehicle driving simulator at Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. She subsequently published award-winning research on human operator and autonomous vehicle interactions with system bias and transitions of control. To address our world’s pressing environmental issues, she led research on renewable energy, leading her to co-author Renewed Energy with energy economist John Weyant. She is an inventor on numerous granted or in-process technology patents. Ernestine has also studied how frontier technologies such as additive manufacturing and 5G will shape our next economy. 

Participating as active citizens in our democracy is a core belief that Ernestine advocates. After starting a nonprofit to serve the community through music and art, she co-authored Civic Work, Civic Lessons with former Stanford Law School Dean Thomas Ehrlich to encourage community engagement with informed moral and civic judgments. The two have since published several articles on political engagement and higher education. Ernestine has served as a board director and advisor to nonprofits such as Ad Council, Asian Pacific Fund, California 100, and Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation.

She completed her B.S., M.S., MBA, Ph.D. and postdoc at Stanford University. Graduating with Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa honors, she was awarded the Kennedy Prize for the top undergraduate thesis in engineering and the Terman Award as one of the top thirty graduating seniors in engineering. She teaches courses in emerging technology and venture capital as an adjunct professor at Stanford.

She is a proud part of a military family that supports local nonprofits and civic engagement.