WONZ Technology is a digital health company built around one goal: helping the world's roughly 1.5 billion smokers cut their exposure to the harmful byproducts of combustion. Founded by Xin (Steven) Du in 2020, WONZ pairs hardware - heat-not-burn smart devices sold under the CIGPAL brand - with digital intervention software, an exhaled-CO tester, and AI-guided coaching. Its proprietary WHC (WONZ Heat Currents) thermal distillation technology is designed to reduce inhalation of more than 90% of the main harmful substances in cigarette smoke while easing cravings and withdrawal. The company holds over 100 patents and has raised more than US$13 million from investors including XVC.
PalmDrive (棕榈大道) is an education-technology company that connects students - mostly Chinese students aiming for top overseas universities - with a network of thousands of mentors who have themselves attended those schools. Founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard alumni in 2013, PalmDrive pairs one-on-one mentorship in admissions, cultural integration, and career planning with an online platform that has drawn a community of more than a million students. The company operates across China and Silicon Valley and has raised over US$10 million in venture funding.
Tina Sheng is the CEO of PalmDrive USA, the North American arm of PalmDrive, an international education and mentorship company. A Stanford-trained educator who grew up in Beijing, she built her career inside Bay Area high schools as an admissions officer, teacher, and college counselor before founding PalmDrive's undergraduate department in 2015. Under her leadership the team has guided hundreds of students into top-20 universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, and helped grow PalmDrive into a venture-backed company serving thousands of students annually.
Neural Galaxy (also operating as Galaxy Brain Scientific) is a Beijing-based brain science company building a precision, non-invasive neuromodulation platform. Its proprietary personalized Brain Functional Sectors (pBFS) technology maps over 200 functional regions of an individual brain, then guides targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation with millimeter accuracy. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT neuroscientists with serial entrepreneur Coach Wei, the company is running clinical and registration trials across depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism and aphasia, and has raised roughly $93M to date.
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.