U POWER Tech is an electric-vehicle technology company building the UP Super Board, a mass-producible 'skateboard' chassis-by-wire that packages propulsion, steering, braking, suspension, thermal management and Level 2+ ADAS into a single plug-and-play platform. By decoupling the chassis from the vehicle body, U POWER lets automakers and fleet operators design custom EVs - vans, pickups, SUVs, specialty vehicles - on top of a validated base, cutting development time by at least six months. Founded in 2021 with offices in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale) and Shanghai, the company sells to OEMs and commercial fleets and has expanded aggressively into North America with products like the UP VAN for last-mile delivery.
Jutta Friedrichs is a German-born designer and co-founder of Soofa, the Cambridge, MA company that makes solar-powered digital signs for city sidewalks. Before Soofa she ran the MÜ furniture studio in Shanghai, co-founded Xindao's in-house design team, won two Red Dot Awards, an iF Design Award and an Elle Decoration Award, and earned a Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She mentors at the Harvard Innovation Lab and works at the seam of hardware, human-centered design, and the civic public realm.

Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Deptrum (光鉴科技) is a Chinese 3D vision company founded in 2018 by three Silicon Valley scientists, including a former Apple depth-hardware lead. It builds full-stack 3D depth-sensing solutions - nanophotonic chips, structured-light and Time-of-Flight cameras, and AI perception algorithms - that let machines see and measure the physical world. Its hardware powers robots, smart cockpits, palm-payment terminals, smartphones and new-retail systems across finance, automotive and IoT.
David Haisha Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Strikingly, a Y Combinator-backed website builder that lets anyone publish a mobile-optimized site in minutes. He left the University of Chicago in 2012 to move to Silicon Valley with co-founders Dafeng Guo and Teng Bao, was rejected by Y Combinator on the first try, got in on the second, and built a company that became the first Chinese startup to graduate from YC. He runs Strikingly with a product-first, superfan-driven philosophy from offices split between Shanghai and San Francisco.
Li Zhu is the founder and CEO of Deptrum (光鉴科技), a 3D vision company building full-stack depth-sensing hardware and software powered by nanophotonics and AI. A Tsinghua undergraduate and UC Berkeley PhD in nano-optoelectronics, he led the depth camera module team behind Apple's iPhone X Face ID before leaving in 2018 to build a structured-light approach that sidesteps Apple's patent monopoly. Deptrum's depth cameras now ship into smartphones, smart cockpits, robots, IoT devices and palm-payment systems, and the company has raised through a Series B.
Meijie Wang is the co-founder and CEO of MetaNovas, an AI-driven biotech that designs functional peptides for skincare, supplements and drug discovery. A former NVIDIA AI infrastructure engineer who built VR games and worked on AI at Stanford's School of Medicine, he now runs a Silicon Valley and Shanghai operation whose knowledge-graph platform aims to compress the decade-long hunt for new bioactive ingredients into something far shorter. MetaNovas counts L'Oreal, Beiersdorf, Haleon, Takeda and Unilever among its partners and raised a Series A led by GL Ventures.

Julian Zheren Ma is the founder and CEO of Inceptio Technology, the company behind what is arguably the world's most deployed autonomous trucking network. Based in Santa Clara and Shanghai, Inceptio has put over 4,000 Level 3 autonomous heavy-duty trucks on real freight routes, logging 500+ million commercial kilometers with zero fatal accidents. Before building Inceptio, Julian was a Corporate VP at Tencent overseeing LBS, search, and early autonomous driving initiatives, then president of G7, China's leading logistics big data firm. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an MBA from IMD Switzerland, and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute China Fellowship Program.