Kai-Fu Lee on Founding and Origins

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.

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).

Founded venture capital firm Innovation Works in 2009, later renamed Sinovation Ventures, investing in AI startups.

Founded 01.AI in 2023, a Beijing-based AI company building agentic tools for companies worldwide using customized open-source models.