Resume

Congxing Cai · San Francisco Bay Area

AI founder-operator and builder-investor helping technical founders build AI-native products, teams, and companies. Background spans NLP research, large-scale consumer platforms, founding, and venture building.

Experience

Partner & CTO

2025 – Present

Embedding VC

AI investing, venture studio building, recruiting infrastructure, and founder support.

Founder & CEO

2021 – 2025

Youpi Inc.

AI-native product studio. Raised from top investors, built 12-person team, launched 10+ AI consumer products including Realm AI and Synco AI.

Head of Discover & Stories Engineering

2016 – 2021

Snap Inc.

Led 80+ person engineering org. Built personalization platform from ground up to 200M+ daily viewers.

Principal Software Engineer

2015 – 2016

Houzz

Re-architected ads systems, Redis Cluster migration, primary on-call and release manager.

Technical Lead

2011 – 2015

Google

Led Ads Reach solutions, built team of 7 engineers, reduced service latency to sub-10ms.

Research Engineer / NLP Research Staff

2009 – 2011

USC/ISI

TREC 2011 Best System award, GeoXray (acquired by TerraGo), 10+ papers, NIH biomedical data systems.

Research Intern

2005 – 2006

Microsoft Research Asia

Document retrieval and learning to rank research.

Education

Ph.D Candidate & M.Eng, Computer Science

Penn State University

B.S., Computer Science

University of Science and Technology of China

Highlights

  • Scaled Snap Discover personalization to 200M+ daily viewers
  • Managed 80+ person engineering org at Snap
  • TREC 2011 Microblog Track Best System award
  • 10+ research papers in NLP, search, and data integration
  • Raised from top investors and built 12-person team at Youpi
  • Launched 10+ AI consumer products
  • GeoXray geographic summarization system acquired by TerraGo