WeRide

Dr. Tony Xu Han is a computer vision and machine learning expert who spent a decade in American academia before jumping to autonomous driving. He earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2008 and was an associate professor at the University of Missouri from 2007 to 2017, earning tenure in 2013, before serving as chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit — one of the earliest large-scale self-driving programs in China. In 2017 Han founded WeRide (originally JingChi) and has led it as chairman and CEO ever since, building one of the world's most commercially diversified autonomy companies: robotaxis, robobuses, robosweepers, and robovans operating across China, the Middle East, and Europe, with a long-standing strategic partnership with the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance and a robotaxi expansion alliance with Uber. In October 2024 he took WeRide public on Nasdaq, making it one of the first publicly traded robotaxi companies.

Yan Li received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and built deep expertise in computer vision through engineering roles at Microsoft — where he was an early member of Microsoft Research Asia — and Facebook. He co-founded WeRide with Tony Han in 2017 and serves as chief technology officer, responsible for the full autonomous driving stack behind WeRide's robotaxi, robobus, and freight products and for the platform approach that lets one core autonomy engine serve multiple vehicle types.