Raymond Wang at LAX with a Boeing 747
Raymond Wang, AeroVect CEO / LAX, 2023
Forbes
30 Under
30
2022
Founder Profile / Aviation & AI

RaymondWang

The man who grew up watching planes land - and decided the tarmac needed a software update.

AeroVect CEO Harvard CS '20 YC W20 TED Speaker Physical AI Pilot
55x
Pathogen reduction
airflow invention
10K+
Live aircraft
crossings, autonomous
58
Team members
at AeroVect

He Taught Airport
Tractors to Drive
Themselves.

There's a specific kind of person who looks at a baggage tractor crawling across a rain-soaked tarmac at 3am and thinks: that vehicle should not have a human in it. Raymond Wang has been that person since he was old enough to press his face against an airport window.

Wang grew up in Vancouver after his family moved from China when he was two years old. He was obsessed with planes - not just the flying part, but the whole messy, choreographed chaos of how airports actually work. That obsession had a habit of turning into something real. At 15, he figured out that aircraft cabin ventilation systems were funneling pathogens around the cabin before they ever reached the filter. He built a computational fluid dynamics simulation, redesigned the airflow, reduced pathogen transmission by 55 times - and won the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. $75,000. The Gordon E. Moore Award. A TED Talk invitation followed.

That's not a warm-up story. That's who Raymond Wang is. The kind of person who looks at a problem, builds the tools to prove his theory, and collects the accolades as a side effect.

I like doing stuff you can see actually work in the physical world.

- Raymond Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, AeroVect

By the time Wang arrived at Harvard - studying computer science at SEAS, earning a conservatory-level music credential on the side, flying planes at Boeing's flying club in Seattle during breaks - the pattern was clear. He wasn't a student finding his way. He was a builder with a checklist.

In 2020, during the pandemic's first lockdowns, Wang and his Harvard classmate Eugenio Donati started building in a Bay Area garage. Not a metaphorical garage - an actual garage. The thing they were building was an autonomous driving system for the kind of equipment airports have run on human labor for a century: baggage tractors, cargo tugs, ground support vehicles. The last 500 feet of global logistics. The part nobody had touched with software yet.

They called it AeroVect.

Building the World's Largest Airside Driving Dataset, One Tarmac at a Time

AeroVect's core product is the AeroVect Driver - a retrofit autonomy kit that can be bolted onto existing ground support equipment from any manufacturer. It combines 3D LiDAR, cameras, and GPS into a system that recognizes aircraft, runways, other vehicles, active taxiway crossings, and the 200-ton obstacles that make airport driving uniquely unforgiving.

Before any of that worked, they had to build something nobody else had: a comprehensive dataset of airport driving. Wang and Donati mounted sensors onto vehicles and spent months mapping the layouts, the quirks, the sight lines, and the traffic patterns of the largest airports in the United States. The result is now what AeroVect calls the world's largest airside autonomous driving dataset - and the digital twins it generated of major US airports are part of what makes the system's performance defensible when an airline puts its most expensive assets in the path of the machine.

Deployment partners now include GAT, dnata (which operates across 35+ countries on six continents), Delta Air Lines at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson - the world's busiest airport - and international hubs including Dubai International. The system has logged tens of thousands of live aircraft crossings without incident.

Labour Shortages, Safety Records, and the Invisible Bottleneck

Airport tarmac work is difficult, dangerous, and chronically understaffed. Ground handlers operate in a compressed geography of moving aircraft, fuel trucks, and jet blast - with shift schedules that airlines can't easily adjust and wages that don't fully offset the hazard premium. The result is a labour market that consistently underserves the operational needs of every major hub.

Wang's insight wasn't that automation was cool. It was that aviation had already tolerated decades of imprecision in this specific workflow while demanding near-zero tolerance everywhere else. The contrast was the opportunity.

The AeroVect Driver reduces what the company calls "human variability" - the unpredictable gaps in asset availability, route compliance, and shift coverage that ripple into departure delays and cargo misses. In operational terms: more predictable service, fewer incidents, and a ground-handling workforce that can focus on tasks requiring human judgment rather than driving in circles at 5am.

Company Snapshot
2020
Founded
Seed
Stage (2022)
3+
Major partners
7
Investors

What "Agnostic Autonomy" Actually Means

AeroVect Driver Stack

3D LiDARCore
Camera Array (360°)Core
GPS / Digital TwinCore
AI Driving ModelProprietary
OEM CompatibilityAll major
Built on: Python · AWS · NVIDIA · Ubuntu
Infra: Terraform · AWS CloudFormation · ECS
Simulation: ARIS Simulation · Yocto

Most autonomous vehicle companies pick a vehicle and build around it. Wang took a different bet: build the software layer so it can be retro-fitted onto any OEM's existing ground support equipment - from any manufacturer, any vintage - without requiring airlines or handlers to replace their fleets.

The insight is economic as much as technical. A handler operating 300 tractors of mixed heritage isn't going to buy 300 new autonomous vehicles. But they will add a sensor kit to what they already own - especially if it costs less than $200,000 total to make a prototype run in live operations, which is what AeroVect accomplished in its earliest proof-of-concept phase.

The AeroVect Explorer - a mapping kit that bolts onto any vehicle - enabled the company to build digital twins of US airports at a pace no competitor could match. Those maps, combined with the AI model trained on the world's largest airside dataset, is what lets the AeroVect Driver navigate the specific geometry of ATL's cargo ramp or Dubai International's apron without starting from scratch at each new deployment.

The system is also designed to handle the highest-stakes moments in the airport environment: aircraft crossings. Recognizing a 747 crossing your driving path and stopping - reliably, every time, with zero false negatives - is the certification-grade challenge that separates demo-ware from real operations. AeroVect has now done it tens of thousands of times in live conditions.

The Unlikely Resume of an Airport Automation CEO

2010
Founded RayCorp - an aviation product development company building ECS (environmental control systems) products for commercial airliners. Age: roughly 12.
2015
Won the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award at Intel ISEF for aircraft cabin airflow invention. Reduced in-cabin pathogen transmission by 55x. Delivered TED Talk "How germs travel on planes - and how we can stop them."
2015-2016
Founded Sustainable Youth Canada, a 500+ member federally-registered nonprofit empowering 110,000+ youth across 8 Canadian regions on climate and energy initiatives.
2016
Invited by Canadian PM Justin Trudeau to a State Dinner celebrating Canada-US Relations on the occasion of US Vice President Joe Biden's official visit to Canada.
2017 - 2019
Harvard years: internships at Delta Air Lines (Operations Strategy), Microsoft (Program Manager), and Two Sigma Ventures (Investor). Private pilot license. Associate's degree, Royal Conservatory of Music Toronto. MIT coursework.
2020
Harvard A.B. Computer Science. Co-founded Civology through Y Combinator W20 (commercial solar financing, political polling tools). Pandemic hits. Pivoted to AeroVect with co-founder Eugenio Donati.
2021
AeroVect demonstrated publicly at GSE Expo Las Vegas. Early investment from Xfund and Scribble Ventures. First live airport deployments in SFO and Atlanta.
2022
Seed funding round closed. Named Forbes 30 Under 30 - Manufacturing & Industry alongside co-founder Donati. GAT partnership announced - first autonomous driving deployment across US airport tarmacs.
2023
International expansion: dnata partnership (35+ countries, 6 continents). Dubai International Airport deployment. Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson (world's busiest airport). Tens of thousands of live aircraft crossings completed.

What He Has Actually Won, Built, and Done

🏆
Intel ISEF Gordon E. Moore Award
$75,000. Best in Fair. 2015. For an aircraft cabin airflow invention that reduced pathogen transmission 55x. Age 17.
📋
Forbes 30 Under 30
Manufacturing & Industry category, 2022. Named alongside AeroVect co-founder Eugenio Donati.
🎤
TED Speaker
"How germs travel on planes - and how we can stop them." Delivered 2015. Viewed millions of times globally.
✈️
World's Largest Airside Dataset
AeroVect built and owns the world's most comprehensive autonomous driving dataset for airport environments.
🤝
State Dinner - Trudeau / Biden
Invited by Canadian PM Justin Trudeau to the 2016 Canada-US State Dinner during VP Biden's official visit.
🇨🇦
Canada's Top 20 Under 20
National recognition as one of Canada's top young innovators. Also ranked among the country's most impactful youth leaders.
🎓
Harvard CS + Y Combinator
A.B. Computer Science, SEAS, 2020. Y Combinator W20 with Civology. Two Sigma Ventures as investor pre-AeroVect.
🛩️
Private Pilot License
ASEL rated. Earned at Boeing's flying club in Seattle. One of several technical certifications including Amateur Radio Operator and Open Water Diver.
🌍
7 Continents Traveled
All 50 US states. All 10 Canadian provinces. Every continent on Earth. Not a résumé line - a personality trait.

Stories That Don't Fit the Bio Box

🧪
When most high school students were studying for exams, Wang was running computational fluid dynamics simulations of aircraft cabin airflow. His key finding: when a passenger sneezes, the existing recirculation system bounces pathogen-laden air around the cabin multiple times before it reaches the filter. His fix - a redesigned airflow deflector - reduced that exposure by a factor of 55. He built a working prototype, entered it in the world's largest pre-college science competition, and came home with the top prize. That was 2015. COVID-19 was still five years away.
🏗️
AeroVect's first prototype was built in a Bay Area garage during the spring of 2020. Lockdowns had emptied airports - which, paradoxically, made them easier to access for testing. Wang and Donati used the window to drive sensor-equipped vehicles around the emptied tarmacs of SFO, mapping the geometry that would eventually become the foundation of their dataset. Building the world's largest airside driving dataset began, literally, because nobody was around to stop them.
🎵
Wang holds an Associate's degree from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and plays both clarinet and piano. He attended St. George's School for secondary education - the same institution known for producing other notable alumni in Vancouver. The music background isn't incidental. People who practice instruments at a conservatory level and build autonomous robots share an unusual trait: tolerance for the gap between where you are in the process and where you're trying to get.
🌐
Wang has visited all 50 US states, all 10 Canadian provinces, and all 7 continents. He keeps travel recommendations on his personal website. The detail matters less as a flex and more as a behavioral signal: he processes the world by moving through it. The company he built automates the movement of cargo. The dataset it runs on was collected by physically driving through airports. The pattern is consistent.

How He Operates

Builder First
Aviation-Obsessed
Multi-Disciplinary
Technically Rigorous
Globally Mobile
Early Mover
Data-Driven
Physically Curious

Wang's career has a consistent through-line that's easy to miss if you focus on the category labels. He isn't an aviation guy who learned software. He isn't a software guy who found aviation. He's a systems thinker who keeps identifying the same kind of problem: a physical process that looks solved from the outside, turns out to be broken at the level of physics or data, and nobody with the right technical toolkit has looked at it carefully enough yet.

The airflow work was that. The tarmac automation work is that. He has described his preference clearly: things you can see actually work in the physical world. The computational and the mechanical. The model and the prototype. He built both as a teenager, and he's still building both.

Wang met his co-founder Eugenio Donati at Harvard - a fact he's mentioned explicitly as a reason the school mattered to him. Not for the credentials, but for the density of people willing to take the founding path. Harvard's SEAS has a strong culture of early-stage entrepreneurship, and Xfund (an early AeroVect investor) emerged directly from that ecosystem.

He went through Y Combinator once before AeroVect - with Civology, a company working on solar financing and political polling tools. That experience didn't produce a breakout company, but it produced something more durable: a founder who knew what YC expected, how to move fast with small teams, and when to pivot. AeroVect was the pivot.

Six Things You Didn't Know

1
He gave a TED Talk at age 15 about stopping airborne germs on planes - before he could legally drive a car in Canada. The talk remains one of the more-viewed student TED presentations in the aviation category.
2
His Sustainable Youth Canada nonprofit - which he started in high school - grew to 500+ members across 8 provinces and influenced sustainability initiatives for 110,000+ young Canadians. He ran it while applying to Harvard.
3
His amateur radio operator license (General Class) sits alongside his private pilot license, open water diving certification, and CPR-C/Bronze Cross. He collects certifications the way other founders collect advisory titles.
4
AeroVect made airport tractors drive autonomously for under $200,000 in prototype costs. In a space where comparable technology trials typically run into the millions, the efficiency was a feature - and an early competitive signal.
5
He was invited to a Prime Minister-hosted State Dinner at age 17 or 18 - alongside Trudeau and Biden - because of his science achievements. It was the kind of credential that sounds invented until you check the dates.
6
He plays clarinet and piano at Royal Conservatory Associate level. The conservatory training and the robotics work share a common requirement: performing precisely under conditions where imprecision has visible consequences.