Before there were pink walls, bunny plushies and a rewards program counting hundreds of thousands of members, there was an engineer with a second job. In 2019, Jiachun Li - who also goes by Summer - was working full-time as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. On the side, she and three co-founders began building a bubble tea shop in Cupertino. Asked later why she would exchange a stable, well-paid career for the unruly economics of food service, Li offered the sort of answer no spreadsheet can generate: “I just really love bubble tea.”
Love got the first store open. Engineering helped make the next one plausible. UMe Tea, short for “U & Me,” was born in Silicon Valley in July 2019 and reached Milpitas the following year. Palo Alto came next, then Davis, Fremont and Mountain View. The company’s growth was steady enough to look almost unfashionable beside the venture habit of buying expansion first and proving the business later. Li and her co-founders funded UMe themselves until 2023, when nine California locations were already profitable.
The education inside the operation
Li’s path to the counter ran through mechanical engineering. Her public professional record lists undergraduate study at North China Electric Power University and graduate work at Purdue University from 2011 to 2014. In 2013, she received first place in a Purdue Calumet undergraduate research award. The record does not make her eventual move into tea obvious. It does show years spent learning to break a physical process into components, measure what happens and revise the design.
Food service gave that training a different set of materials. The inputs included tea and fruit, but also labor minutes, customer preferences and the layout of a busy shop. A mechanism can be isolated on a bench. A retail system has to accommodate a teenager ordering extra sweetness, a new employee learning during a rush and a product team trying a seasonal ingredient. Li’s useful translation was to keep the engineer’s questions while accepting the consumer business’s unruly answers.
A drink assembled as a system
A bubble tea shop can appear simple from the customer side of the counter. Pick a base, adjust the sweetness, add pearls, tap a card. Behind the counter, the same order is a choreography of brewed tea, milk, fruit, ice, toppings, measurements, sequence and timing. Make the choreography too dependent on memory and every new employee becomes a new source of variation.
Li recognized a familiar class of problem. UMe offered mobile ordering from its first day, years before contactless ordering became a default response to the pandemic. The company also developed a workflow in which an employee scans an order code and a machine mixes the specified amounts of toppings, milk and tea. The change reportedly reduced training for that part of the job from two or three days to roughly two hours.
This is the part of Li’s career where the phrase “engineer turned founder” becomes more than biography. She did not leave systems thinking behind when she moved into hospitality. She moved it closer to the mess of ordinary life, where a process has to work during a rush, for a new hire, with a customer waiting. The point of automation was not spectacle. It was consistency and a shorter path from recruitment to competence.
“Our tea is not only pretty but also fun.”Jiachun Li
The second product under the first
The systems were quiet. The bunny was not. UMe’s surprise cups concealed a small plush toy beneath the drink, borrowing the suspense of Chinese blind boxes and Japanese capsule toys. Customers could see the beverage but not the character. A purchase ended with a reveal, and one reveal invited a collection. Young customers posted the toys, compared them and sometimes walked up to tell the team how many they owned.
“A lot of kids buy our bubble tea to get the plushies,” Li said, “and some will even walk up to tell us how many they’ve collected.” The cup was carrying two products with different clocks. The tea was immediate and perishable. The bunny lasted, sat on a desk, appeared in a video and made the next visit easier to imagine.
Around it, UMe built a room that explained itself quickly: soft pink walls, plastic cherry blossoms, rabbit figures and K-pop. Nearby high school and college students used the stores to study, gossip and gather. Li noticed the social behavior shifting beyond the Asian American customers who had long treated boba shops as casual third places. “When Gen Z Americans hang out,” she observed, “they prefer standing outside a bubble tea shop with a cool-looking drink to sitting at a café.”
Localization is a verb
Li’s observations also ran through the menu. Large tea chains headquartered in Asia could bring brand recognition to the United States, but their product teams were farther from American customers and often worked on slower release cycles. UMe could listen at the counter. It sourced from local farms, introduced seasonal drinks and learned that a hit in one market was not a universal law.
In Asia, Li explained, customers often leaned toward refreshing drinks. In the United States, UMe saw demand for thick, rich flavors. One example layered creamy brûlée, crushed Oreo pieces and chewy pearls. Sweetness was its own field study. Many Asian customers preferred less; some American teenagers asked for 120 percent.
That lesson is easy to flatten into “know your customer.” Li’s version is more operational. Knowing means having a development cycle fast enough to respond, suppliers able to support the change, staff who can make the result consistently and stores close enough to the decision-maker that weak signals do not disappear into a quarterly report.
Earning the next store
In June 2023, UMe announced its first outside capital: $2.2 million from iFly.vc. At the time, its nine stores averaged about 1,000 daily orders each. Chicago, the company’s first location outside California, opened that July. The sequence made the financing feel less like a rescue and more like permission to accelerate a machine already running.
The company later expanded into Arizona and Los Angeles while adding Bay Area shops. By 2025, it raised a reported $10 million Series A. UMe now lists more than 30 stores across three states and more than 900,000 members. Store counts can hide fragile businesses, but UMe’s early discipline offers a useful distinction: opening one shop is a project; building the supply chain, training, technology, marketing and culture that let the next shop keep a promise is a company.
Li’s public moments suggest that she sees the store as civic space, too. When Los Angeles faced destructive wildfires in 2025, she shared UMe’s offer of free beverages, snacks and a place to pause at its Palms shop for people affected. The gesture used the assets the business already had: a room, a counter, food, staff and a familiar place to sit.
The shop becomes a lab
In 2026, the mechanical engineer resurfaced in a new invitation. Li opened UMe’s California stores to AI startups looking for real retail environments in which to test products. She named computer vision, voice agents, robotics, smart equipment, customer experience and operations analytics. The offer included staff and customer feedback, kitchen workflows and the chance to iterate quickly.
A demo can behave perfectly in a conference room. A tea shop supplies queues, noise, customization, spills, rushes, new employees and customers who did not come to admire the software. It has edge cases with receipts. For an AI founder, that mess is useful. For UMe, the experiments could produce tools fitted to its actual work rather than software designed around a generic diagram of retail.
The invitation also completes a loop in Li’s story. In 2019 she brought an engineer’s eye into a consumer business. Seven years later, she is offering that consumer business back to engineers as a place to learn. The bunny still matters. So does the sweetness dial, the pink wall, the first sip and the friend across the table. Li’s work has been to let those details feel loose and social while the operation underneath grows more exact.
The cup gives people a small surprise. The system gives the surprise somewhere new to happen.
UMe Tea began because Li loved bubble tea. Its development has depended on a less romantic habit: paying attention. She watched how teenagers gathered, how American tastes diverged, where training slowed a store and which part of a purchase customers carried home. She did not choose between engineering and delight. She assigned each a job. One makes the shop dependable. The other makes it worth returning to.