Joseph Phua

Joseph Phua (born 1984) is a Singaporean-Taiwanese entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the dating app Paktor and co-founder and chairman of the live streaming platform 17LIVE Group. He is also the founder of Nextapple News and chairman of the single family office Turn Capital.

Phua attended Stern School of Business, New York University, majoring in Finance for his undergraduate degree. He obtained a master's degree in Business Administration from Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. After graduation, he worked at McKinsey & Company and Citibank.

Phua is the founder of Paktor, a mobile dating app targeting Asia markets he launched in 2012. He was inspired by the dating app Tinder that he used while attending the University of Chicago in 2012.

In 2017, Phua merged Paktor with 17LIVE, a live streaming platform he co-founded with Machi Jeffrey Huang, to form M17 Entertainment. After the merger, Phua became the CEO of M17 Entertainment. In 2020, he resigned as the CEO and assumed the role of chairman and the group was renamed 17LIVE Group. Phua is said to be 17LIVE's largest individual shareholder after the company went public on the Singapore Stock Exchange in 2023. In 2019, Phua was selected by Asian fashion media Tatler as a Generation T (Gen.T) award recipient.

In 2021, Phua's family investment office, Turn Capital, acquired the podcast platform SoundOn and merged it with the voice social service Goodnight to form the SoundOn Group. The same year, he also acquired Dapp Pocket and Cappuu of a Taiwanese blockchain company. The two companies, Dapp Pocket and Cappuu, were later merged into a retail blockchain finance platform Coinomo.

In September 2022, Phua founded Nextapple News, an independent news platform in Taiwan.

In 2021, Phua announced the establishment of the Phua and Chang Scholarship, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business endowment. The scholarship was first awarded to a student from Taiwan.

Phua met his wife through the app Paktor with whom he started his family in Taiwan, and they have been residing in Taiwan since 2013.