# Mike Tung

> Mike Tung is the founder and CEO of Diffbot, the company behind the world's largest automated knowledge graph — a continuously-rebuilt database of 10+ billion entities and over a trillion facts extracted from the open web. A UC Berkeley EECS graduate and Stanford AI lab dropout, Tung spent 15+ years building Diffbot with minimal funding (under $15M total) into a platform used by Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, Snapchat, and 400+ enterprises. In January 2025 he launched the Diffbot LLM, an open-source language model grounded in the knowledge graph, achieving top factual accuracy benchmarks among sub-100B models.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at Diffbot
- **Organizations:** Diffbot, StartX (Stanford Startup Accelerator), Stanford AI Laboratory
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), UC Berkeley, Graduate study in Artificial Intelligence (PhD program, did not complete), Stanford University
- **Known for:** Built the world's largest automated knowledge graph: 10+ billion entities, 1+ trillion facts, rebuilt every 4-5 days, Raised under $15M total while becoming a profitable AI infrastructure company, Diffbot used by Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, Snapchat, eBay, Cisco, Adobe, Salesforce, and 400+ companies

## Career timeline

- **2001-2002** — Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Corporation
- **2002** — Software Engineer at eBay
- **2004-2006** — Founding Machine Learning Engineer at TheFind, Inc. (later acquired by Facebook)
- **2006** — Data Scientist, Search and Marketplace Intelligence at Yahoo!
- **2006-2008** — Graduate research at Stanford AI Lab; funded himself filing patents for ~$20K each
- **2007-2010** — Founding Software Engineer at ClickTV (later acquired by Cisco)
- **2008** — Founded Diffbot
- **2011** — Launched first public Diffbot APIs (August 2011)
- **2012** — Raised $2M seed round; investors included Andy Bechtolsheim, Joi Ito, Brad Garlinghouse
- **2012** — Diffbot became StartX's first-ever investment
- **2015** — Diffbot reached profitability with 90-95% extraction accuracy
- **2016** — Raised $10M Series A led by Tencent, with Felicis Ventures, Amplify Partners
- **2018** — Announced world's largest automated knowledge graph at O'Reilly Strata NY
- **2019** — Launched Diffbot Knowledge Graph: 2B+ entities, 10T+ facts; published 'Diffbot Master Plan Part One'
- **2020** — Released NLP API - industry-first Knowledge-as-a-Service NLP system
- **2021** — Partnership with Avast to analyze privacy policies at web scale
- **2025** — Launched Diffbot LLM - open-source GraphRAG system based on LLaMA 3.3 (January 9, 2025)

## Achievements

- Built the world's largest automated knowledge graph: 10+ billion entities, 1+ trillion facts, rebuilt every 4-5 days
- Raised under $15M total while becoming a profitable AI infrastructure company
- Diffbot used by Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, Snapchat, eBay, Cisco, Adobe, Salesforce, and 400+ companies
- Launched Diffbot LLM achieving top MMLU-Pro score (70.36%) among open-source sub-100B models and 81% on FreshQA - outperforming ChatGPT with web search
- StartX's first-ever investment recipient
- Speaker at O'Reilly Strata, O'Reilly AI Conference, The Knowledge Graph Conference, DeepLearning.AI
- Led Stanford's entry in DARPA Robotics Challenge
- Built Diffbot with a team of ~33 employees across North America and Europe

## Latest updates

- **2025-01** — Launched Diffbot LLM - open-source language model based on LLaMA 3.3 (70B and 8B), achieving best-in-class factual accuracy benchmarks. Available at diffy.chat and open-sourced on GitHub. Outperforms ChatGPT with web search and Google Gemini on FreshQA (81% vs lower scores).
- **2024** — Diffbot reported ~$3.1M in annual revenue with a team of 33-35 employees, continuing lean profitable operations.
- **2023-04** — Published 'Generating Company Recommendations using Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs' on Diffbot blog.
- **2023-03** — Published 'Grounded Natural Language Generation with Knowledge Graphs' exploring LLM+KG integration.
- **2021-11** — Published 'A Less-biased Way to Discern Media Bias Using Knowledge Graph Enhanced AI'.

## Links

- Website: https://diffbot.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketung/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/mikektung
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/diffbot

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/mike-tung
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-13