Kai-Fu Lee

Lee describes 01.AI as building tools to develop AI agents for companies, using open-source models customized for each client, and providing a 'white-glove service' at this early stage of AI-agent adoption to co-create applications generating cost savings and business.

Kai-Fu Lee — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: taiwanese-American computer scientist who led Microsoft Research China/Asia (1998-2000) and Google China (2005-2009), founded venture capital firm Innovation Works (later Sinovation Ventures) in 2009, and founded AI company 01.AI in 2023, which builds agentic AI tools for companies using customized open-source models. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Kai-Fu Lee's role is documented as: founder of 01.AI (2023); Chairman/head of Sinovation Ventures (formerly Innovation Works, founded 2009) A February 2026 interview describes Lee as heading Sinovation Ventures and as 'the founder of 01.ai,' actively discussing the company's strategy (research date: 2026-08-23).

Lee stated that 01.AI works with traditional-industry companies (banking, insurance, mining, energy) but will decline engagements where a client is unprepared for AI adoption (e.g., lacking prior digital transformation), because it would take too long and cost too much to succeed.

Lee was born in Taipei, the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China; he immigrated to the United States in 1973 and later earned a BS from Columbia University and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Raj Reddy, with a thesis on speaker-independent continuous speech recognition (the SPHINX system, 1988).

Lee was the founding director of Microsoft Research China (later Microsoft Research Asia) from 1998 to 2000, and served as president of Google China from 2005 to 2009, before founding venture capital firm Innovation Works (later renamed Sinovation Ventures) in 2009 and, in 2023, founding AI company 01.AI.

Lee is the author of 'AI Superpowers' (2018) and co-author of 'AI 2041' (with Chen Qiufan, 2021), has served as co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council, and was named to Time's 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

As of the February 2026 interview, Lee described 01.AI as actively engaged with traditional-industry clients on AI-agent adoption, though the source did not report specific revenue, client-count, or model-performance metrics for the company.