peking-university
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Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
Jasper Zhang
Jasper Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbolic, an open-access AI cloud and GPU marketplace based in San Francisco. A math prodigy who won gold medals at the Chinese and Russian Mathematical Olympiads and finished a UC Berkeley math PhD in two years, he moved from quantitative research at Citadel Securities to blockchain research at Ava Labs before founding Hyperbolic in 2022 with Yuchen Jin. His mission: make large-scale AI compute affordable and available to anyone with an idea, from students to enterprises.
Bin Zhao
Bin 'Tony' Zhao is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of Agora (NASDAQ: API), the Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service he built after 20 years on the frontlines of internet voice and video - from being a founding engineer at WebEx to CTO of JOYY with 300 million users. Founded in 2013, Agora now powers over 80 billion minutes of real-time engagement monthly, supplied the audio backbone for Clubhouse's viral moment, and in 2025 launched a Conversational AI Engine bridging human voice and large language models.
Junwei Bao
Junwei Bao is the co-founder and CEO of Seyond (formerly Innovusion), a Silicon Valley-founded LiDAR company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a physics background from Peking University, Bao spent nearly two decades building precision optical sensors before pivoting to autonomous-driving hardware. He co-founded Timbre Technologies - the company that invented OCD (optical critical dimension) scatterometry, a kind of microscale LiDAR for semiconductors - then led Baidu's autonomous driving hardware division before founding Innovusion in 2016. Under his leadership, Seyond delivered 230,000 automotive-grade LiDAR units in 2024 and holds a 12.8% global ADAS LiDAR market share, ranking fourth worldwide.
Sam Liang
Sam Liang is the co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai, the AI meeting intelligence platform that crossed $100M ARR in 2025 with just under 200 employees. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who co-invented Google Maps' Blue Dot and sold his first startup Alohar Mobile to Alibaba in 2013, Liang founded Otter in 2016 after drowning in 30-40 weekly meetings with no reliable way to capture what was said. Today Otter serves 35 million users across enterprise, education, and government, processing tens of billions of minutes of conversation - and has evolved from a transcription tool into an autonomous AI meeting agent suite that can answer questions, coach salespeople, and conduct product demos in real time.
Jordan Schneider
Jordan Schneider is the founder and editor-in-chief of ChinaTalk, the premier independent newsletter and podcast covering US-China tech and policy. A Yale-educated historian who earned a master's in economics from Peking University's Yenching Academy, Schneider has built ChinaTalk into a 65,000-subscriber powerhouse with over 1 million podcast downloads in 2025 alone. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a former 2023-24 AWM Scholar, with bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wired, and Lawfare. Based in New York and fluent in Chinese, Schneider synthesizes elite policy analysis with accessible storytelling, covering semiconductors, AI development, export controls, and the full sweep of US-China competition.