Paul Li has spent most of his career around the parts of a car that drivers rarely admire. Airbags. Seatbelts. Electronic architecture. The negotiations between an elegant sketch and the hard points beneath it. His latest company begins with a plain observation: every electric-vehicle program keeps solving many of the same difficult problems, and those repetitions consume money, engineers and calendar.
U POWER Tech, which Li founded in 2021, packages that hidden work into a rolling electric foundation called the UP Super Board. Propulsion, braking, steering, suspension, batteries, thermal management and vehicle electronics live in the lower body. A customer develops the upper body - the cabin, cargo box, styling, software and services that give the finished vehicle its identity.
Li describes the arrangement with an unusually firm boundary: U POWER will not build a consumer-facing car brand. It supplies automakers, fleet businesses and mobility ventures. The company can help integrate a complete vehicle, but its name does not need to become the name on the hood. In an industry that often treats vertical integration as a moral virtue, he has chosen a quieter position underneath other people's products.
The education beneath the platform
Li, also known in Chinese as Li Peng, did not study mechanical engineering. He graduated in international economic law from what is now Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, then entered the automotive industry through Autoliv. He stayed with the safety supplier for roughly a decade. Years later, when asked how a young company without its own production history could earn trust, he returned to those years. Safety, he said, had become an instinct rather than a feature to add later.
The next moves expanded the system. At Continental, Li led work in infotainment and intelligent communications in China. In 2018 he joined Horizon Robotics to run its intelligent-driving business. He later became a vice president at Great Wall Motor, helped map its digital transformation, founded the connected-mobility company Bean Tech and took charge of Great Wall's premium electric project known internally as SL, which became Saloon.
Look backward from U POWER and the sequence becomes legible. Autoliv supplied the discipline of safety. Continental added communication and the electronic layer. Horizon brought artificial intelligence. Great Wall offered the view from inside a carmaker, where product plans collide with engineering schedules, factories and capital. The skateboard chassis is a physical object, but Li's pitch for it is organizational: let teams work in parallel instead of waiting on one another.
A useful answer to the “soul” question
Automakers have a familiar objection to outside technology: give a supplier too much control and the brand surrenders its soul. A chassis carries cost, performance and safety. Why hand it away? Li's answer is less romantic than the question. A company's soul, he argues, is determined by the value its users need. Resources are finite, so a company should concentrate them where customers experience a meaningful difference.
“A company's soul is not defined by itself, but by its users.”Paul Li on where an automaker should focus
Electric propulsion changes the location of that difference. Battery capacity and motor configuration still matter. But Li expects more distinction to come from space, software, intelligent functions and service. Standardizing the foundation can give a smaller vehicle program room to compete on those qualities. It can also lower the number of vehicles needed to justify a project, an important calculation for a specialized van or a model designed for one regional market.
This is why the architecture and the business model mirror one another. The lower body is common; the upper body varies. U POWER develops a global supply chain; a partner adapts the finished product to Mexico, the United States, Europe, Africa or China. Li calls the approach “GLOCAL,” an inelegant word for a practical division of labor.
The theory began collecting hardware proof in public. At CES 2024, U POWER displayed its platform with vehicles from partners including Olympian Motors and LUMOS EV. It delivered an initial UP Super Board to New York-based Olympian, whose retro-styled Model O1 looks nothing like U POWER's own squared commercial van. The contrast made the platform argument visible: a common base does not require a common personality.
Later that year, U POWER and Chinese bus manufacturer King Long signed a strategic agreement at IAA Transportation in Hannover. Li acknowledged that the cooperation had passed through repeated challenges and tests. By then the company was also working with VIZEON on commercial vehicles for Mexico and Latin America. In December, U POWER completed a Series B financing led by Hefei Industry Investment, with the money directed toward production and capacity for its electric van program.
The outward movement continued in 2025. U POWER gathered more than 30 partners and investors in Xiamen for its first Partner Day and put them into the UP VAN for a practical driving challenge. It announced a program with Majesty Group to develop vehicles for Ghana on the standardized platform. At ACT Expo in Los Angeles, it brought a range of urban-logistics and specialty vehicle configurations to North America.
Falling, flying and trimming the sail
Li speaks about entrepreneurship without smoothing its edges. He once compared starting a company to jumping from a building. Before the leap, everything remains possible, yet nothing happens. After it, the founder has committed not only himself but partners, employees and families. The dangerous uncertainty is whether the motion is flight or a prolonged fall that merely feels like flight.
Another metaphor comes from sailing. Li races as a crew member and has worked alongside accomplished Chinese helmsmen. Skilled helmsmen, he observed, make plans but refuse to become prisoners of a plan. They keep reading the immediate conditions, making small corrections and finding the edge the wind offers. His conclusion was blunt: innovation is trial and error, not a synonym for being right.
“In entrepreneurship, it is difficult to tell whether you are falling or flying.”Paul Li on the founder's hardest judgment
That image fits U POWER better than the usual language of disruption. The fixed point is the belief that EV development can be separated into a standard lower layer and a differentiated upper one. Around it, the company has adjusted vehicle type, partner, geography and route to production. The Super Board appeared first alongside passenger-car concepts; the immediate commercial emphasis settled on vans, chassis cabs and specialty vehicles, places where cargo space, operating cost and a shorter development program can be measured directly.
It also helps explain Li's insistence on staying B2B. A consumer brand would demand attention across retail, marketing, service and the emotional theatre of the car launch. U POWER's advantage, if it holds, sits deeper in the stack. Every hour spent persuading a shopper could be an hour diverted from persuading an automaker that a shared foundation will not erase its identity.
The bet under the badge
The hard part now is repetition of a different kind: delivery, validation, certification and manufacturing, market after market. Platform businesses sound efficient because one foundation can serve many products. They become efficient only when the common layer is stable enough to absorb difference without forcing every customer back into custom engineering. The more invisible the platform becomes in the finished vehicle, the more work it must do before the body is attached.
Li's career has prepared him to appreciate that unglamorous burden. Safety companies teach that hidden systems matter most when they fail. Suppliers teach that another company's deadline becomes your own. Carmakers teach that an attractive concept still has to survive tooling, testing and a balance sheet. Sailing teaches that the original course is only a hypothesis about the wind.
U POWER is ultimately a wager about focus. Automakers should not need to reinvent propulsion, steering, braking and thermal management to create a vehicle for a narrow use or a local customer. They should be able to buy a dependable base and spend their scarce imagination above it. Li is not asking drivers to fall in love with a skateboard chassis. He is asking the industry to notice how much more it might build once the chassis becomes reusable.