The professional practice of Valerie Chai

About

A practitioner’s route into finance

Valerie Chai founded starCresto in January 2006, the same year she began her business degree at Nanyang Technological University. It was a specialist teaching practice — one-to-one and small-group instruction in corporate finance, accounting, economics and statistics for university, MBA and postgraduate students — and it ran on that model for eighteen years.

Teaching the subject at close range led to practising it. From May 2021 she worked as lead consultant at Hyrule Advisory on company valuation and capital structuring for private companies, leading fundraising of more than US$10 million.

The move into managing money came from her clients. Several of the business owners she had advised on valuation and capital structuring went on to sell their companies, and asked her to look after the proceeds. She took the regulated route rather than an informal one — a period as portfolio manager at Golden Hill Asset Management, then Managing Partner of Tigris Asset Management from March 2024, where that work sits today.