In 2012, Ji launched his personal firm, Peak Labs, and later led the event of Magi, a search engine. The device extracted info from throughout the online to reply queries—conceptually much like right this moment’s AI-powered search, however powered by a customized language mannequin.
Magi was briefly fashionable, drawing tens of millions of customers in its first month, however client adoption didn’t stick. It did, nevertheless, entice enterprise curiosity, and Ji tailored it for B2B use, earlier than promoting it in 2022.
AI acumen
Manus would change into his subsequent act—and a extra bold one. His cofounders, Zhang Tao and Xiao Hong, complement Ji’s technical core with product know-how, storytelling, and organizational savvy. Each Xiao and Ji are serial entrepreneurs who’ve been backed by enterprise capital agency ZhenFund a number of occasions. Collectively, they signify the type of long-term collaboration and worldwide ambition that more and more defines China’s subsequent wave of entrepreneurs.
JULIANA TAN
Individuals who have labored with Ji describe him as a transparent thinker, a quick talker, and a tireless, deeply dedicated builder who thinks in programs, merchandise, and consumer flows. He represents a brand new era of Chinese language technologists: equally at dwelling coding or in pitch conferences, fluent in each constructing and branding. He’s additionally a product of open-source tradition, and stays an energetic contributor whose initiatives often garner consideration—and GitHub stars—throughout developer communities.
With new funding led by US enterprise capital agency Benchmark, Ji and his crew are taking Manus to the broader world, relocating operations outdoors of China, to Singapore, and actively concentrating on customers all over the world. The product is constructed on US-based infrastructure, drawing on applied sciences like Claude Sonnet, Microsoft Azure, and open-source instruments comparable to Browser Use. It’s a distinctly international setup: an AI agent developed by a Chinese language crew, powered by Western platforms, and designed for worldwide customers. That isn’t incidental; it displays the extra fluid nature of AI entrepreneurship right this moment, the place expertise, infrastructure, and ambition transfer throughout borders simply as shortly because the know-how itself.
For Ji, the purpose isn’t simply constructing a worldwide firm—it’s constructing a legacy. “I hope Manus is the final product I’ll ever construct,” Ji says. “As a result of if I ever have one other wild thought—(I’ll simply) depart it to Manus!”
