shenzhen
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ZTE survived the cutoff. Now it wants the computing business.
A supplier ban stopped ZTE’s major operations in 2018. Today, the telecom equipment maker is chasing AI infrastructure while keeping a hand in everything from Mexico’s mobile networks to gaming phones.
Tencent turned a chat window into a business empire
Weixin and WeChat reach 1.439 billion monthly active accounts. Tencent’s bet is that the same network can keep selling games, move money and give AI a paying audience.
The Wearable Pump That Freed Moms From the Wall Outlet
How a Shenzhen startup built the world's best-selling wearable breast pump, then turned one gadget into a whole aisle of motherhood.
HONOR Escaped a Sanctions Trap. Now It Wants to Build the AI Device World Without Owning It.
The smartphone brand survived by leaving Huawei. Its second act is a more interesting trick: making phones, PCs and wearables work like one AI system - while borrowing some of the best pieces from everyone else.
The Charger Company That Quietly Became an Energy Company
Anker started by selling a better phone charger on Amazon. Fourteen years later it is putting battery walls, robot vacuums, and solar systems in homes across 100-plus countries - and betting its next act is energy, not accessories.
The DJI Battery Guys Who Turned a $12M Kickstarter Into a Home Energy Company
A team of ex-DJI battery engineers used Kickstarter as a factory floor, turned camping gear into home power, and built a billion-dollar clean-energy company one power outage at a time.
How a Dorm-Room Drone Project Became the Company That Owns the Sky
Frank Wang built his first flight controller in a Hong Kong dorm. Two decades later DJI sells most of the drones on Earth - and Washington is trying to decide whether to let it keep selling them here.
The TV Company That Started Selling You the Sun
Skyworth spent three decades becoming a top global TV brand. Now it is quietly betting the next three on putting solar panels on Chinese roofs - and the math is starting to favor the panels.
Angio8
Angio8 (Shenzhen Tonglu Technology, 通甪科技) is a medical robotics company building a surgical robot and treatment platform for minimally invasive vascular interventional procedures. Its system lets physicians remotely manipulate catheters and guidewires with force feedback, aiming to make interventional surgery safer, more precise, and less reliant on repeated radiation exposure for the operating team. Founded in 2021 and based in Shenzhen's Bao'an District, the company is led by co-founder and CEO Yunfei (Richard) Cao and is backed by investors including Oriental Fortune Capital, Kangyu Capital and Ruiqian Capital.
Lawrence Chen
Lawrence Chen (Chen Haoliang) is the founder and CEO of SpeakIn Technologies, a Shenzhen-based voiceprint recognition company he started in 2015. An MIT dropout who previously worked on Google Glass's human-machine interaction program, Chen built SpeakIn to verify identities through voice rather than passwords, claiming 99.5% accuracy and selling into Chinese banks and public security bureaus. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2018.
Li Zhu
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.
Yao Zhang
Yao Zhang is the founder and CEO of RoboTerra, a robotics-education company that teaches kids around the world to code and build robots. A Columbia-trained education economist who walked away from a finished PhD's worth of dissertation work to build hardware, she was named a 2016 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of RoboHub's Top 25 Women in Robotics. RoboTerra has reached 1,000+ institutions across more than 40 countries, splitting its life between Silicon Valley and China.
Huawei
Huawei is a Shenzhen-based technology company and the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment. Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, it now spans carrier networks, enterprise ICT, cloud computing, digital power, and a consumer business that builds smartphones, wearables, and the homegrown HarmonyOS operating system. Despite years of U.S. sanctions, the company posted roughly 880.9 billion yuan in 2025 revenue and pours over a fifth of that back into R&D.
Yuxing Li
Yuxing Li is listed as an Interim CEO connected with Huawei, the Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications and consumer electronics giant. Based in Redwood City, California, Yuxing sits at the intersection of two of the most scrutinized technology ecosystems in the world: Silicon Valley and Shenzhen.
DeepRoute.ai
DeepRoute.ai is a Shenzhen-headquartered autonomous-driving company building full-stack self-driving software, from Level-4 robotaxi systems to mass-market driver-assistance for production cars. Its DeepRoute IO 2.0 platform - powered by a 40-billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model running on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor - is being shipped by Great Wall Motor and a handful of other OEMs.
Liam Casey
Liam Casey is the Irish founder and CEO of PCH International, the supply chain orchestration company he named after California's Pacific Coast Highway. Built from a Cork dairy farm upbringing and a decade in European fashion, PCH became a billion-dollar operation linking Silicon Valley's most ambitious hardware companies to a network of over 1,200 Chinese factories. Known as 'Mr China' in tech circles, Casey is renowned for carrying three phones, living out of hotels across two continents per week, and never once learning Mandarin — a deliberate vulnerability he credits for building deeper factory relationships than any fluent speaker could.
PCH International
PCH International is a product development and supply-chain orchestration company founded in 1996 by Cork-born entrepreneur Liam Casey. With operations spanning Cork, San Francisco, Shenzhen and Cape Town, PCH helps consumer-electronics brands and startups design, engineer, manufacture, package and fulfill hardware products at global scale.
Nathan Xu
Nathan Xu (also known as Xu Gao) is the co-founder and CEO of Plaud AI, the company behind the world's best-selling AI voice recorder and notetaker. A serial entrepreneur who failed three times before hitting gold, Xu bootstrapped Plaud from a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 to $180M+ ARR by 2025 - without a single dollar of venture capital. His credit-card-sized Plaud Note and wearable NotePin devices, which transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations in 112 languages, have shipped to over 1.5 million users in 170+ countries. Based in San Francisco with roots in Wuhan, China, Xu represents a new breed of transpacific founder betting that the next great hardware platform fits in your pocket - or around your neck.