Yu-Sung Chang

An engineer who kept building until the machines could see

Yu-Sung Chang did not arrive at industrial AI in a straight line. He arrived through geometry, graphics, e-commerce, and healthcare - and every stop taught his software a little more about how to understand the world.

Today he is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Vivity AI, a company he describes as "The Industrial AI Company." Its work is unglamorous by design: real-time accident detection on plant floors, quality control on production lines, predictive maintenance before a machine fails, analytics that turn a tangle of sensor readings into a decision a plant manager can actually use. The customers are petrochemical plants, shipyards, and heavy-equipment manufacturers - not the kind of places that trend online, but the kind that keep the physical economy running.

Vivity AI runs on two continents at once. Its headquarters sit near San Francisco, in Pleasanton, California, while its engineering and operations reach into Seoul. That split is not an accident of remote work. It reflects Chang's own arc - a career built across the United States and Korea, between deep research and hard industry.

From virtual sculpting to real machines

Chang's foundation is academic. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stony Brook University between 2000 and 2005, where he was a lead researcher on 3D geometric modeling and shape design. His work involved recursive subdivision of volumetric shapes - "virtual sculpting," in the language of the field - and it stretched into animation, finite element modeling, and shape design. He digitally carved objects that never physically existed. Two decades later, he would be modeling objects that very much do: turbines, pipelines, and hulls.

After his doctorate, Chang spent years at Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica. There he worked on the graphics and geometry systems that make the software render the world. He also wrote for the Wolfram Blog, and his posts reveal a playful streak that rarely shows up in a founder bio: he generated Fourth of July fireworks in code, built a photo-booth app in three steps, and - in one memorably titled piece - carved industrial pumpkins with Mathematica. He also helped bring splines into the product, a quietly foundational piece of how curves get drawn.

A CTO twice over before the third act

Between research and Vivity AI, Chang built a track record as a technology leader. He co-founded and served as CTO of Huma.AI, an AI startup in the life-sciences and healthcare space, in the late 2010s. He then took one of the most demanding technical seats in Korean commerce: Chief Technology Officer and head of the Data Intelligence division, with the rank of EVP, at SSG.COM - one of the country's largest e-commerce platforms, tied to the Shinsegae and E-Mart retail empires.

That is the résumé of someone who could have kept collecting senior titles. Instead, in 2022, Chang started over. He co-founded Vivity AI to take on problems most software people never touch - the messy, high-stakes environments of heavy industry, where a missed reading can mean a shutdown or a serious accident.

Why Hanwha wrote the check

In its early funding, Vivity AI raised roughly $8.4 million, with Hanwha Systems as a strategic investor. Hanwha is part of one of South Korea's largest industrial groups - the kind of conglomerate that operates the very plants and shipyards Vivity's software is built to protect. That is a meaningful signal: not a generalist venture fund betting on a pitch deck, but an industrial giant with a direct view of the problem.

The recognition has followed. In 2024, Vivity AI was the subject of a Frost & Sullivan Entrepreneurial Company of the Year write-up highlighting its industrial AI platform - an early external marker that the bet is landing.

Career timeline

Fun facts and the human details

The through-line of Chang's career is a builder who cannot quite stop building. A few things that round out the picture: