Turing Space: Ideated, Incubated, and Launched Out of UC Berkeley
Company founded: 2020
Founders: Yao-Chieh HU (Jeff) (UC Berkeley Master of Engineering 2020, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research - FinTech), Henry Hang
As of 2025, Turing Space is a global digital identity company that has completed a successful Series A funding round and has expanded to offices across four countries. The company traces its beginnings to UC Berkeley’s supportive ecosystem, and in particular UC Berkeley Law Executive Education, whose early belief in, and partnership with, Turing sparked what has since become an international movement toward trusted digital credentials.
The Turing story began with a simple but ambitious idea: to help schools digitize diplomas and make them instantly verifiable. At the time, digital identity and verifiable credentials were still an emerging concept, with limited market momentum. Yet, UC Berkeley Law Executive Education Dean Jim Gilbert saw both the potential and the importance of this innovation. He placed his trust in me and my startup by signing our first agreement. That inaugural project involved just 60 certificates for UC Berkeley Law Executive Education. From that modest start, Turing Space has since scaled to serve over 550 organizations and 40 government entities across 12 countries, protecting more than 6 million digital certificates. Every milestone can be traced back to that first act of confidence from UC Berkeley Law Executive Education.
The UC Berkeley entrepreneurial ecosystem played a pivotal role in nurturing the company’s vision during its formative years. Early on, I joined Free Ventures, UC Berkeley’s student-run startup incubator. Free Ventures provided more than a workspace—it brought together a community of founders who gathered twice weekly to brainstorm, challenge each other’s assumptions, and connect with experienced mentors and visiting venture capitalists. That environment instilled the resilience and creativity necessary to pursue what, at the time, felt like an untested idea: digitalizing everyone’s diploma.
From there, I moved into CITRIS Foundry, which offered not only physical space to work but also a community of founders with expertise in healthcare, mechanical engineering, and other deep-tech fields. That diversity of perspectives broadened my thinking, helping me refine how digital identity could extend to multiple industries beyond education.
In 2019, I joined UC Berkeley SkyDeck’s hotdesk program (now called Pad-13). However, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck—forcing me to return to my hometown in Taiwan and start fresh. That unexpected shift was a turning point, pushing Turing Space to embrace international growth from day one.
Academically, UC Berkeley faculty were also instrumental. Professor Guo Xin in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research provided critical support during my graduate studies. She offered me opportunities to teach Blockchain 101 twice to my MEng classmates—experiences that not only honed my ability to communicate complex ideas but also sparked the first round of recruitment for what would eventually become Turing’s Certs team. Those early collaborators helped move the project from an abstract concept into a functioning minimum viable product, proving that the vision could be built.
Looking back, it’s clear that UC Berkeley served as the cradle of Turing Space. The university provided the first customer, the first incubator, the first mentors, and the first academic champions who encouraged experimentation and boldness. Most importantly, UC Berkeley gave me the confidence to pursue a vision that many initially thought was premature for the market.
As of 2025, Turing Space is leading global efforts to build trusted digital identity infrastructure—serving governments, universities, healthcare systems, and corporations. No matter how far the company expands, we remain deeply grateful to UC Berkeley. It was on that campus, among its classrooms, incubators, and visionary leaders, that Turing Space’s spark was ignited. That ignition continues to guide us as we work to make secure, verifiable digital credentials a reality for individuals and institutions worldwide.
Published: September 2025
