She, China's top partner

How does AI · Yuan Yeyi’s SenseTime experience drive the MiniMax funding miracle?

The venture capital circle welcomes a group of female faces.

Looking back over the past three months, several companies riding the wave of AI have been impressive:

Moore Threads and Mu Xi queued up to ring the bell on the STAR Market, with a market value once surpassing 300 billion yuan;

MiniMax set a record in Hong Kong stocks, with a market value once exceeding 400 billion HKD.

Surprisingly, the previous impression of such founders might have been confined to engineering men. But this time, several outstanding female co-founders have emerged.

From left: Peng Li of Mu Xi, Zhou Yuan of Moore Threads, Yuan Yeyi of MiniMax

Capable, persistent, good at communication, their roles in the team are indispensable. Together, they have created the most impressive partners in the AI era.

Behind Moore: The Best Female Partner

Back in 2020, Zhang Jianzhong, then Vice President of NVIDIA globally, decided to start a business, bringing along colleagues Zhou Yuan, Zhang Yubo, and others, focusing on full-feature GPU development, leading to the birth of Moore Threads.

Among them, Zhou Yuan is a relatively low-profile name.

There is little public information about her. Before joining Moore, Zhou Yuan worked at HP, PHOENIX, and NVIDIA, mainly in marketing and channel development. From 2004 to 2020, she served as Senior Director of Market Ecosystem at NVIDIA.

It was during this 16-year career that Zhou Yuan met Moore Threads founder Zhang Jianzhong, a fateful encounter that set the stage.

That year, Zhou Yuan joined Moore as a co-founder, serving as COO, and in 2023, she joined the board, responsible for internal governance and daily operations.

“With limited entrepreneurial resources and many tasks, team weaknesses are most likely to be exposed. A leader’s role isn’t to criticize flaws but to piece together everyone’s ‘strengths,’” Zhou Yuan once said.

Since then, Zhou Yuan has often appeared with Zhang Jianzhong as Moore’s COO at various events. As Moore moved swiftly into the STAR Market, the veil of this female co-founder gradually lifted.

At 31, she rings the bell with MiniMax

Earlier this year, MiniMax was listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and unexpectedly, a 90s girl appeared on the ringing platform—31-year-old Yuan Yeyi.

If Yan Junjie is MiniMax’s technical brain, then Yuan Yeyi is the right-hand person who turns technology into products and pushes them to market.

Reviewing her background: she studied at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., majoring in Electrical Engineering, with minors in Economics and Mathematics. After graduation, she joined SenseTime, starting as a manager in the Financing and Strategic Investment Department, quickly rising to Assistant to the CEO.

In 2021, Yuan Yeyi became Director of SenseTime’s Innovation Business Unit. At that time, the company was in a critical phase of preparing for an IPO, and she engaged with multiple investors. Perhaps she didn’t expect that this experience would become a valuable asset for future entrepreneurship—one year later, Yan Junjie left SenseTime to found MiniMax, and Yuan Yeyi joined shortly after.

At that time, the resources she accumulated at SenseTime proved useful: during MiniMax’s early funding rounds, investors almost all mentioned Yuan Yeyi, and she played a key role in the fundraising process.

Later, Yuan Yeyi almost took charge of all affairs outside of R&D.

Capable, commanding presence, strong execution—over the years, she has left a deep impression on industry insiders, who often describe her as having “a maturity beyond her age.”

Starting at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Mu Xi’s Iron Lady

In contrast, Mu Xi CTO Peng Li took a more hardcore route.

A graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, she worked at ChaoWei Semiconductor (AMD) for 13 years, leading the full development of multiple GPU products, earning the title of “Enterprise Academician,” and becoming the first Chinese woman scientist at AMD to receive this honor.

The story of China’s two major GPU giants has a similar starting point—2007, Chen Weiliang joined ChaoWei Semiconductor Shanghai as Senior Director. Over a decade later, witnessing the weaknesses in China’s integrated circuit industry, he recruited Peng Li and Yang Jian, both former AMD Shanghai “Enterprise Academicians,” to start a business.

Chen Weiliang once explained that Mu Xi’s English name “MetaX” represents origin and future. Through the team’s efforts, “the history of China’s lack of autonomous, controllable high-performance GPUs will come to an end.”

At Mu Xi, Peng Li is the top technical decision-maker and the only woman in the core management team responsible for technology. Under her leadership, Mu Xi launched two high-performance GPU products in just three years, with “a single batch of chips going directly into mass production.”

The subsequent story is well known: in December 2025, Mu Xi successfully listed on the STAR Market, with an issue price of 104.66 yuan per share, opening with a 568% surge, and later its market value exceeded 300 billion yuan.

Growing up in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, Peng Li once described her attachment to the place as “born and raised here”—“Here, I spent the most brilliant 20 years of my life. Its magic is like Silicon Valley, where the air is filled with endless possibilities.”

In the AI Era

They Are Rising

Three companies with trillion-yuan market caps, three female co-founders—these stories are not isolated.

Recently released in the 2026 Hurun Global Rich List, Chinese figure Lucy Guo, with a net worth of 9 billion yuan, became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire born after 1990. As early as 2016, she co-founded data annotation company Scale AI. Although she left later due to differences in vision, she still retained about 6% of the shares.

Later, with Meta’s acquisition of about 49% of Scale AI, Lucy Guo’s stake was valued at approximately $1.25 billion, placing her among the top 1% of global billionaires.

There’s also Hong Le Tong from Guangzhou, aged 25, who attended South China Normal University Affiliated High School, winning multiple math Olympiad awards. She then studied at MIT, Oxford, and during her PhD at Stanford, chose to join the entrepreneurial wave.

In March this year, her AI startup Axiom announced a $200 million Series A funding round, with a valuation of $1.6 billion (about 11B RMB).

Equally impressive is Peking University alumna Ouyang Lì—an early math prodigy in high school, later admitted to Peking University, studied abroad in the U.S., earning a PhD, and joined OpenAI as a research scientist. After leaving OpenAI, she announced her participation in founding Thinking Machines Lab, which once created the world’s largest seed round funding.

Once upon a time, people’s impression of female entrepreneurs was still stuck thirty years ago: such as Luxshare Precision founder Wang Laichun, HanSen Pharmaceutical’s Zhong Huijuan, Gree Electric’s CEO Dong Mingzhu… In the traditional industries crowded with dragons and phoenixes, they wrote their own wealth legends.

Now, the baton has quietly been passed.

These new-generation female entrepreneurs often have top academic backgrounds and are familiar with cutting-edge science. They wield code and computing power, storming into the world’s most core high-tech battlegrounds. The wave is sweeping in—AI is not only changing the world but also, at an unprecedented speed, reopening the space for ordinary people’s wealth imagination.

The era has thrown out that ticket, waiting for those who can truly sail to the other side.