In 2012, Ji launched his own company, Peak Labs, and later led the event of Magi, a search engine. The tool extracted information from across the net to reply queries—conceptually much like today’s AI-powered search, but powered by a custom language model.
Magi was briefly popular, drawing tens of millions of users in its first month, but consumer adoption didn’t stick. It did, nevertheless, attract enterprise interest, and Ji adapted it for B2B use, before selling it in 2022.
AI acumen
Manus would grow to be his next act—and a more ambitious 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 firm ZhenFund multiple times. Together, they represent the form of long-term collaboration and international ambition that increasingly defines China’s next wave of entrepreneurs.
JULIANA TAN
Individuals who have worked with Ji describe him as a transparent thinker, a quick talker, and a tireless, deeply committed builder who thinks in systems, products, and user flows. He represents a brand new generation of Chinese technologists: equally at home coding or in pitch meetings, fluent in each constructing and branding. He’s also a product of open-source culture, and stays an lively contributor whose projects commonly garner attention—and GitHub stars—across developer communities.
With recent funding led by US enterprise capital firm Benchmark, Ji and his team are taking Manus to the broader world, relocating operations outside of China, to Singapore, and actively targeting consumers world wide. The product is built on US-based infrastructure, drawing on technologies like Claude Sonnet, Microsoft Azure, and open-source tools resembling Browser Use. It’s a distinctly global setup: an AI agent developed by a Chinese team, powered by Western platforms, and designed for international users. That isn’t incidental; it reflects the more fluid nature of AI entrepreneurship today, where talent, infrastructure, and ambition move across borders just as quickly because the technology itself.
For Ji, the goal isn’t just constructing a worldwide company—it’s constructing a legacy. “I hope Manus is the last product I’ll ever construct,” Ji says. “Because if I ever have one other wild idea—(I’ll just) leave it to Manus!”
