GGV Capital just made a couple of high-profile hires

GGV Capital, the nearly 20-year-old cross-border venture firm, with offices on both Sand Hill Road and in Beijing and Shanghai, has brought some new, interesting people into its orbit: Jason Costa, who spent the last three years as a product manager at Pinterest and the two previous years working on Twitter’s platform, has joined the outfit as an entrepreneur-in-residence; he’ll be working with the firm’s current portfolio companies and sourcing new ones, particularly in the areas of e-commerce, social media, and mobile.

Denise Peng, who spent nearly a dozen years with the Chinese online travel company Qunar, including as its COO, has meanwhile joined the firm as a venture partner. Qunar was a GGV portfolio company that went public, then merged last year with publicly traded rival Ctrip to form a $20 billion travel giant in China. Peng will work out of the firm’s Beijing office.

GGV is also formally announcing that seed-stage investor Semil Shah is a venture partner with the firm, though the appointment was some time ago. Shah manages his own nascent firm, Haystack, and is currently investing his third fund, a $8.5 million fund. The firm was the first investor in Chariot, the San Francisco-based private bus service that was acquired last week by Ford for undisclosed terms.

Earlier this year, GGV —  whose many bets is Didi, the China-based ride share giant — closed on $1.2 billion in capital across four funds. These include a $675 million main fund; a $225 million “Plus” fund to back its most promising companies as they mature; a $250 million “Discovery” fund that focuses largely on seed-stage opportunities in China; and a side, $50 million “Entrepreneurs” fund that consists largely of company founders as LPs and that invests pro rata across the funds.

[Disclosure: Shah is an advisor to StrictlyVC, a business owned by this editor.]