# Zheqing (Bill) Zhu

> Zheqing (Bill) Zhu is the founder and CEO of Pokee AI, a Bellevue, Washington startup building foundation AI agents that plan, reason, and use thousands of tools to execute real online workflows. A Stanford PhD in reinforcement learning, he previously led the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta AI, where he shipped the open-source Pearl platform and RL systems credited with over $500M in annual revenue impact. In 2025 Pokee AI raised a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures with backing from Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and angels including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at Pokee AI
- **Organizations:** Pokee AI, Meta AI (former), Stanford University (alumnus), Duke University (alumnus)
- **Nationality:** Chinese-American
- **Education:** PhD in Reinforcement Learning (advised by Benjamin Van Roy), Stanford University, MS in Computer Science, Stanford University, BS in Computer Science, summa cum laude (Finance minor; advised by Ronald Parr), Duke University
- **Known for:** Founded Pokee AI and raised a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures, Led the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta AI and open-sourced Pearl, a production-ready RL platform, RL systems he led are credited with over $500M in annual revenue impact across Meta ads, recommendations, and Reality Labs

## Career timeline

- **2017** — Graduated Duke University summa cum laude; joined Meta as a Machine Learning Engineer on Ads Growth ML
- **2018** — Became Engineering Manager / Tech Lead for Ads Growth Machine Learning at Meta
- **2021** — Promoted to Senior Staff Research Lead Manager; Head of Applied Reinforcement Learning at Meta AI
- **2023** — Completed PhD in reinforcement learning at Stanford while working full-time; open-sourced Pearl, Meta's production RL platform
- **2024** — Founded Pokee AI to build foundation AI agents; launched in October 2024
- **2025** — Raised a $12M seed round (3x oversubscribed) led by Point72 Ventures; launched public beta

## Achievements

- Founded Pokee AI and raised a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures
- Led the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta AI and open-sourced Pearl, a production-ready RL platform
- RL systems he led are credited with over $500M in annual revenue impact across Meta ads, recommendations, and Reality Labs
- Grew Meta's active advertiser base from 2M to 12M through ads growth initiatives
- Earned a Stanford PhD in reinforcement learning while working full-time at Meta
- Pokee AI's tool-usage model reported at 97%+ accuracy selecting from thousands of tools, beating GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, and Gemini 2.5 Pro at function calling
- Published at JMLR, ICML, ICLR, KDD, RecSys, CIKM, ICRA, and IROS
- Recipient of the Asian American Science and Engineering Innovation Award (CIE/SEA)
- Graduated Duke summa cum laude with the Highest Distinction Graduate Award and Alex Vasilos Memorial Award

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — Pokee AI announced a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures with Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung NEXT; public beta went live.
- **2025** — Spoke on reinforcement learning and AI agents at the World AI Conference and other venues.

## Links

- Website: https://www.zheqingbillzhu.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zheqingzhubill/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ZheqingZhu
- GitHub: https://github.com/BillMatrix

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zheqing-zhu
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-20