Jian Zhang and the 99-Year Startup

Three years into building Noah Medical, Jian Zhang gave his colleagues an unusual anniversary present: another 96 years of work. He had incorporated the company in a coffee shop. Now he was thanking a team of more than 70 people, along with collaborators, vendors and service providers. Then came the long calendar. “We got 96 years more to go.” A startup birthday had become a rather substantial renewal notice.

The arithmetic is charmingly specific. Three plus 96 makes 99, a horizon long enough to outlive any ordinary business plan. Read as an anniversary wish, it gives his story a useful starting point. Zhang was celebrating an organization, with all its dependencies, and imagining it continuing. The coffee shop belonged to the past. Most of the proposed life of the company still lay ahead.

An apprenticeship in making things work

Before that coffee-shop incorporation, there was a lengthy education in engineering. Zhang earned his master’s degree and doctorate at Columbia University. He also completed an MPhil between them, finishing his doctorate in 2010. Mechanical engineering and robotics supplied the academic foundation for a career that would move repeatedly between designing machines and organizing people to build them.

He worked as an engineer at Intuitive Surgical, then joined Auris as employee No. 2. His responsibilities at Auris grew to directing system engineering and research. The employee number offers a particularly compact piece of biography: Zhang had joined while the organization was still very young. Later, he would take on the first-person responsibilities of starting companies himself.

His route included co-founding Robotphoenix and AcuVu and serving as CEO. Between those ventures, he held a position at TransitCo with the title Thinker/Strategizer. It is an unusually candid job description. Many executives perform both activities; comparatively few put the slash on the door. Robotphoenix was part of his career from 2015 to 2016, followed by TransitCo and then AcuVu from 2017 to 2018. Those dates place the earlier ventures close to Noah’s beginning, rather than in some distant chapter of his working life. By the time Noah began in 2018, Zhang had experience as an engineer, an early employee and a founder.

The garage gets an address

Noah’s early working space was a garage in Redwood City. In 2021, the business moved to a larger facility in San Carlos. Those locations put some geography around a familiar Silicon Valley origin. The garage was a place to begin work. The next address reflected the need to accommodate a company that was becoming harder to fit inside its opening anecdote.

Zhang later described a transition from an organization centered on research and development to one preparing for commercialization. Each description carries a different set of responsibilities. A development team must make the design work. A commercial organization must also make production, delivery and support work. The inventor’s problem acquires colleagues in other departments, many of whom have their own very reasonable questions.

His anniversary message gave those colleagues unusually broad billing. Outside suppliers and service providers appeared alongside the people on the payroll. That choice makes the origin story more interesting. A garage can be occupied by a small group. A growing hardware business depends on relationships that extend beyond its walls. Zhang’s thank-you list made some of that surrounding organization visible.

A robot, and the room around it

One of Zhang’s more revealing product explanations concerns a power cable. Describing Galaxy, Noah’s first commercial robotic system, he emphasized that the integrated machine was designed to use a single one. He also discussed its compact footprint and the work involved in setting it up and putting it away. For a robotics founder, he was spending a pleasing amount of time on the furniture problem.

These are choices about what surrounds the machine. A system occupies space, requires preparation and leaves work behind when its immediate task is finished. Zhang’s explanation treated those activities as part of the design brief. His account of development also emphasized direct feedback from customers. The intended user had a role before the finished product arrived.

The single cable makes the argument tangible. It is easy to understand without knowing how the robot’s internal mechanisms operate. It also gives a founder profile a useful small detail to hold against the large ambitions. A product can be named Galaxy while its designers are thinking carefully about the business of plugging it in. Both scales of attention belong in the same company.

“We got 96 years more to go.”

Jian Zhang, on Noah’s third anniversary

What $150 million buys is more work

In April 2023, Noah announced a $150 million Series B. SoftBank Vision Fund led the round, with Prosperity7 Ventures as co-lead. Tiger Global participated, along with existing investors including Hillhouse, Sequoia China and AME Cloud Ventures. The stated uses included meeting demand for Galaxy and continuing research and development. Capital would support the current business while financing work on what might follow.

The announcement marked a change in scale. The incorporation and the garage could now sit in the same company history as a financing round involving international investors. The distance between those scenes is considerable. Yet the money also enlarged the practical obligations: a growing business has to organize resources across development and commercial operations while keeping both moving.

There is a sterner part of that operating history. In April 2025, an FDA warning letter addressed to Zhang identified deficiencies in Noah’s quality-system processes, including corrective-action investigations and complaint handling. The letter discussed the company’s responses and continuing corrective work. It is a documented reminder of the scrutiny that accompanies manufacturing. A long-lived company must be built in its procedures as well as in its products.

The buyer has a timetable

Zhang’s public writing increasingly gives attention to the organization buying the equipment. In a June 2026 essay, he proposed four questions about consistency, staffing, sustainable demand and local integration. His argument asked buyers to consider whether a new capability would fit their actual operating conditions. A successful demonstration would leave much of that assessment unfinished.

That is a commercially interesting position for a person selling sophisticated technology. It recognizes that buyers inherit a routine, a workforce and a budget. They must find room for an addition in all three. Equipment that depends on scarce expertise or irregular availability presents a different proposition from equipment that can be supported by an existing team on a predictable schedule.

In an earlier outlook essay, written at the end of 2023, Zhang had already connected technical advances with operational and economic benefits. He discussed smaller systems and expanding uses of artificial intelligence, while insisting on a business case for investment. The combination matters. He was interested in what engineering could make possible and in the conditions under which customers would find it worthwhile to buy.

Those writings also help explain why a cable belongs in this story. The object and the purchasing framework concern the same transition: a machine leaving its maker’s environment and entering somebody else’s. At that point, the customer’s staffing arrangements and floor space become part of its commercial life. Zhang’s descriptions repeatedly return to that encounter.

There is also a quieter measure of continuity in his public messages. At Thanksgiving in 2025, Zhang thanked his team and investors and encouraged colleagues to rest and recharge. The message was brief, with no elaborate theory of leadership attached. Set beside the earlier anniversary note, it shows a recurring habit in his public communication: acknowledging the people whose contributions make the company possible.

A different kind of border crossing

International business brings its own operating details. In comments supplied for a 2025 industry report, Zhang acknowledged that changes in trade policy could affect production costs. He described an evaluation of sourcing and manufacturing strategies. It was a practical response to a problem outside the design room. A robot’s economics can change even when its engineering remains the same.

By August 2026, Zhang was discussing a larger geographic ambition. Speaking in Hong Kong, he described preparations for a possible listing there and expansion in mainland China. The reported plan contemplated raising more than $100 million and filing an application as early as 2027. These were prospective steps. They placed a new capital market and a new commercial push on the company’s calendar.

At that point, Zhang said roughly 90 percent of Noah’s revenue came from the United States. That concentration gives the international plans some commercial context. Entering another market would broaden the business beyond the country supplying most of its sales. Hong Kong, in his account, offered an international financial center through which to support the mainland expansion. The proposal connected two sides of company building: finding capital and finding customers. Carrying it out would be another substantial chapter after the garage.

The timing also coincided with Noah’s Galaxy II software launch. In a September interview, Zhang explained the update through requests from existing users, including more choice and fewer manual steps. The product was moving into another iteration while the business considered another market. That creates a recognizable founder’s predicament: the current organization needs attention at the same time as its next version.

Return to the third-anniversary message and the 96 remaining years. The number works best as an expression of intent, offered to the people helping build the company. Between incorporation and international ambitions lie jobs, facilities, manufacturing processes, investors and customers. Zhang’s story has accumulated all of them. A coffee shop was enough room to incorporate Noah. The work of making it last has required considerably more space.