Team

Ellen Chang is a mission-focused deep tech investor whose career spans Naval intelligence as a Captain in the U.S. Navy, JP Morgan's aerospace banking team, and a decade-plus as a systems engineer and program director at Northrop Grumman, where she worked on autonomous systems including the Global Hawk. She has operated on both sides of the government-industry boundary and understands how decisions get made inside both.

That background shaped how she built S708. A company's technology is one component. Its supply chain, its government customers, its allied market access, its position in a broader ecosystem: those are the other components. Her training in systems engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School gave her the framework to see all of them together — and to build a firm that addresses all of them.

Ellen founded her own aerospace accelerator in 2015, pivoted it into an investment syndicate in 2018, and has since incubated 75+ deep tech startups across the full spectrum from early stage to unicorn. She is also Managing Director of CapZone Impact Investments, a specialty fund mobilizing private capital for public purpose.

She holds degrees from Penn, the Naval Postgraduate School, and Wharton, where she co-founded the Wharton Aerospace platform now in its 21st year.

Ethan manages deal flow and builds the firm's technology infrastructure. He also operates the USV/UUV Hub, the largest open-source database in the unmanned maritime sector, tracking over 400 organizations globally. It is itself a direct expression of S708's ecosystem building pillar: building the shared knowledge infrastructure the industry needs to grow.

He has worked in deep tech since 2021 across the ONR SBIR Commercialization Cohort, Orbit Fab, BMNT, and Common Mission Project, working with startups from Pre-Seed through Series C across the full range of deep tech verticals.

He holds a degree in Economics and Statistics from Wharton, where he founded the Undergraduate Aerospace Club and was recognized as a Penn President's Innovation Prize Finalist. He continues to help organize the Wharton Aerospace Ventures conference each fall.

Eric Du is the founder of United Pacific Innovation Alliance, where he works at the intersection of defense technology, public policy, and US–Taiwan industrial collaboration. His focus includes autonomy, unmanned systems, and emerging defense capabilities, with direct engagement across government institutions, legislators, and executive-branch stakeholders in both markets.

For S708, Eric organizes strategic events connecting business and political leaders, builds partnerships across government, industry, academia, and foreign diplomats, and supports S708's presence across the Defense, Space, and Biotech sectors in the US and Taiwan markets.