This narrative, structured in an as-told-to format, stems from an extended conversation with He Jiabin, a 35-year-old entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Ropeta, a pioneering robotics startup headquartered in Beijing. His reflections, originally articulated in Mandarin, have been meticulously translated and thoughtfully refined for precision, coherence, and conciseness.
When it comes to making decisions, He Jiabin places a profound trust in his intuition. He describes himself as someone who navigates opportunities by instinctive reasoning rather than excessive calculation—a principle that has guided his entire professional journey.
He’s early life began in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province—a region positioned in the heart of central China, known for its manufacturing spirit and industrious culture. At the age of seventeen, driven by a fascination with design and technology, he left his home city to enroll at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. There, he pursued a degree in product design, a field that deftly combines creative aesthetics with functional innovation. It was during these formative academic years that his attention turned to the study of wearable hardware—devices that blend design artistry with technological computation to enhance human experience.
In his third year, he obtained an internship opportunity at Microsoft Research Asia, a division renowned for pioneering advancements in computing. At the lab, his responsibilities extended beyond theory—he collaborated with scientists to transform prototype experiments, typically confined to research environments, into tangible consumer products. Among several projects, one investigation explored the feasibility of integrating touch sensitivity into a watch display long before the debut of the Apple Watch, foreshadowing modern wearable trends.
This forward-looking research inspired his ambitious graduation project: a collection of innovative smart backpacks. Each design had a distinct purpose—one incorporated GPS tracking to enhance child safety for concerned parents, another was equipped with a built-in camera to assist cyclists in documenting their rides, while a third concept integrated a charging feature capable of powering a mobile phone for an entire week. The ingenuity and social relevance of this project attracted national media attention, giving He his first taste of public recognition.
A mentor at the institute later encouraged him to consider an academic path, highlighting the need for more scholars to help foster an authentic, China-rooted design discipline instead of continuously adapting ideas imported from Western institutions. Although He respected the vision of cultivating a uniquely domestic design identity, his personal curiosity pushed him toward a different trajectory. He wanted to understand not just how ideas were conceived, but how large companies scaled them into massive operations—how corporations managed thousands of employees while still fostering creativity. He aspired to learn how markets, organizational structure, and consumer needs converge to drive innovation on a grand scale.
After graduation, He joined Baidu’s Learning Lab as an interface designer, marking his entry into the high-tech corporate world. There, he contributed to projects involving smart bicycles, self-driving vehicles, and augmented smart glasses before transitioning to Baidu’s central research institute. While the company’s autonomous-driving initiatives achieved measurable success, many other experimental projects never reached the production stage. These unfulfilled prototypes reaffirmed He’s belief that the ultimate measure of innovation lies in real-world usability—whether technology can genuinely enrich everyday life.
Eager to build something that would connect directly with consumers, He shifted to the founding team of Ling Technology. The company became widely known for “Luka,” an owl-shaped robot designed to read stories aloud to children. Its educational and emotional appeal made it a commercial triumph, selling between four and five million units. Over time, He’s leadership capabilities elevated him to the role of partner, where he supervised multiple facets of the business—product design, production strategy, brand development, and marketing execution. For five years, he dedicated himself to growing the company, but external factors such as fierce market competition gradually eroded margins. In addition, the implementation of China’s “Double Reduction” policy, which significantly restricted after-school tutoring and related educational technologies, caused investor enthusiasm in the ed-tech sector to decline sharply. Facing diminished fundraising prospects, He ultimately decided to leave the company.
In 2021, he joined Bytedance, where he served as the head of the industrial design department. Among all major tech enterprises, he viewed Bytedance as both the most financially robust and the most aggressively innovative—a company with unmatched dynamism and potential. Under his supervision, he worked on designing cutting-edge virtual-reality headsets that quickly became leaders in the Chinese market. At its height, He managed a division of more than two thousand employees. Yet, despite the scale and resources, he began to feel detached from the hands-on creative process. The bureaucratic layers of a giant organization often diluted personal influence, making it difficult to trace one’s impact on the final product.
Simultaneously, he observed growing investor interest in identifying promising entrepreneurs capable of shaping the next generation of consumer AI products. Having spent over a decade immersed in human–computer interaction, He recognized a significant gap: most so-called “weak AI” devices failed to engage users on an emotional level, leading to widespread disappointment. As artificial intelligence entered a new era of natural interaction and learning capability, he envisioned opportunities to close that gap.
Although large corporations offered stability and sophisticated infrastructure, He realized they tended to operate vertically, imposing strict boundaries on creative exploration. The compartmentalized nature of such environments constrained his desire to build something original from the ground up. This clarity led him to a defining decision: to establish his own venture where innovation and emotion could coexist.
Today, as the cofounder and CEO of Ropeta, He spearheads both the strategic management and the creative direction of the company. He believes that the development of companion robots—machines capable of forming emotional connections with their users—represents an exceptional direction for the future of AI-integrated consumer products. Building such technology requires not only technical precision but also a nuanced understanding of emotional intelligence, empathy, and human–machine bonding.
The company was originally founded in 2022 by Zhou Yushu, and He joined approximately one and a half years later. Under their joint leadership, Ropeta successfully completed multiple fundraising rounds: an initial investment of $3 million, followed by a second round of 10 million yuan, and most recently, in August, an impressive 30 million yuan (approximately $4.2 million). These milestones have positioned the startup for accelerated development.
He has since recognized that his personality and working style align better with smaller, fast-moving teams. He values the immediacy of feedback loops in startups—where every positive or negative reaction from consumers directly informs the next iteration of the product. Free from the cumbersome hierarchy of corporate structures, he experiences a sense of autonomy and creative fulfillment. His near-term goal is tangible yet ambitious: to achieve sales of 20,000 robotic units by year’s end. Ultimately, his aspiration is for Ropeta to become the preeminent global brand specializing in adorable, emotionally intelligent pet-like robots.
Reflecting on the lessons he has accumulated throughout his career, He identifies distinct takeaways from each professional chapter. Microsoft taught him the operational rigor and methodical processes that characterize Western corporations. Baidu revealed to him that within Chinese tech ecosystems, programmers often occupy the innovative forefront, whereas designers must continually assert their contribution to gain influence. Bytedance, for its part, demonstrated how high compensation is frequently paired with equally high expectations, creating a fiercely competitive internal culture.
In comparison, life as a startup founder demands a completely different mindset. At large companies, he says, one can finish a workday and mentally disengage. In contrast, leading a small enterprise leaves no refuge from responsibility—there is no preexisting infrastructure to absorb mistakes, no department to delegate unsolved problems. Every challenge, from conceptual design to financial planning, requires his direct attention. He admits that entrepreneurship has rendered him perpetually thoughtful: his mind constantly revolves around the product, the team, and the company’s survival. Yet he views this relentless engagement not as a burden, but as a privilege. When his efforts generate value and tangible impact, he no longer interprets the activity as labor—it becomes an act of creation.
He’s story stands as a reflection of China’s evolving relationship with innovation: a landscape where intuition meets technology, and where courage to build independently defines the cutting edge of modern entrepreneurship.
Readers who have stories about launching companies in China are invited to share their experiences with the editor at akarplus@businessinsider.com.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/quit-big-tech-build-robotic-pets-china-baidu-bytedance-microsoft-2025-11
