After Raising $60 Million, Whaley Technology's Shengxu Ye Says Business Model Is the Starting Point of Everything

"Reject grand entrepreneurial narratives." By Muxin Xu

Discussing SaaS companies in 2025 might seem passé. But what if I told you this eight-year-old B2B firm has survived both boom and bust, closing a $60 million Series C this year?

Still probably ill-timed, especially as fresh-faced AI founders enter the industry declaring their intent to change the world. But for Jerry Ye, founder of Whale (帷幄科技), changing the world is secondary — "making money" comes first.

Though he always seems to be smiling and refers to himself as "CAO (Chief Apology Officer)," a three-hour conversation with Jerry yields no shortage of provocative takes. General-purpose agents will be obsolete, he argues, because he's taught every business development rep at his company to build agents: "An agent is like someone helping you make a PowerPoint. Is the important part the aesthetics, or what's on the slides?" He started building hardware from day one — a decision every investor disliked — yet that accidentally became this SaaS company's moat eight years later. He considers business model the core strategy determining a company's success or failure, and believes "business itself is a hard science, sometimes even more complex than chips."

Hearing this, you begin to understand why, amid today's frenzied AI investment climate, it was this B2B founder operating in the margins who managed to raise money.

Last month, Whale announced the completion of its C1 and C2 rounds totaling over $60 million, with investors including Temasek, Linear Capital, Bosch Ventures, MTR Lab, Telkom Indonesia, Singtel, and SM Prime, the Philippines' largest retail conglomerate. Previous investors in Whale include NIO Capital, Source Code Capital, BAI Capital, and Alpha Startups.

On this occasion, An Yong Waves sat down with Jerry to discuss his new product plans and what he's learned from doing business across the globe.

The conversation follows —

Part 01

Why would a B2B company build hardware?

An Yong: Describe Whale in one sentence.

Jerry: We define ourselves as enterprise AI for business — helping clients implement AI in a vertical domain.

An Yong: You've released a series of AI products. What specific verticals?

Jerry: For example, Singapore's oldest local bank equips its tellers with our smart badges. Through 480,000 hours of monthly recording and AI analysis, we do sales script training, customer analysis, and potential customer scoring. We also have Yumoo, an enterprise AI knowledge base, among other products.

An Yong: All AI-related. Is this a necessary move or posture for all SaaS companies facing AI disruption?

Jerry: AI is infrastructure-level change. When you meet clients today, if your company doesn't have an AI component, clients won't choose you. In a sense, this is also democratization — it brings many companies back to the same starting line. Most SaaS companies are currently following up with agents.

An Yong: But everyone's building applications. Why did you choose hardware?

Jerry: That's a good question. We started building hardware from day one, and that's why many investors didn't favor me. At first I was young and fearless, thinking hardware could be developed quickly. It's not. Hardware development cycles are measured in years, because compared to applications, a hardware bug causes far greater damage. But looking back now, a company that started building hardware eight years ago has supply chain capabilities that a new company simply can't match. Even if someone tried to replicate us, I'd be much faster.

An Yong: Recently many companies from other industries have pivoted to launch AI products. For these "crossover" companies, is AI a buzzword or genuinely effective?

Jerry: I view this in reverse. I produce what customers need — it just happens to have the prefix "AI" today. Enterprise cameras I've built for six or seven years, badges for four or five. The latter initially relied on ASR plus small models. What used to take a month now takes five minutes — that's the core difference.

An Yong: So your product offering hasn't changed; AI just improved your production efficiency.

Jerry: Exactly. For all these years, the world's needs haven't changed — eating, drinking, sleeping. AI just changed the production tools.

Part 02

"Gold Rush" in Southeast Asia

An Yong: This $60 million funding round has mostly Southeast Asian investors. Why raise in Southeast Asia? Are Southeast Asian institutions bullish on Chinese SaaS companies?

Jerry: First, B2B or AI companies are relatively scarce in Southeast Asia, because it's difficult for the region to produce globalized companies natively. Also, many Southeast Asian institutional investors returned from the US, or were influenced by Western business models to some degree — they favor technology-driven, replicable business models.

An Yong: What was the valuation?

Jerry: Asian company valuations are far lower than US companies', so we plan to enter Japan and Western markets this year. If you can globalize into Europe and America, as US investors would put it, all Asian companies are "particularly cheap."

An Yong: Despite being a global company, your investor mix seems complex — Chinese dollar funds, Singapore sovereign wealth funds, Indonesian and European CVCs, and so on.

Jerry: Anyone who actually does business knows money is money — only brand matters. When I raise in Southeast Asia, basically as long as I say I'm backed by Temasek, backed by Telkom Indonesia, getting meetings is smooth.

An Yong: You now have an office in Southeast Asia. What's doing business in Indonesia like?

Jerry: Many things in Indonesia are more "flexible" than domestically. This is true across Southeast Asia except Singapore.

An Yong: How many people does your company have globally now?

Jerry: About 200.

An Yong: Many companies are now trying to operate with leaner organizational structures.

Jerry: My new understanding of organization is that small and elite teams are viable. Simply put, everyone does everything, rather than each person being assigned their own tasks. This way, know-how can actually accumulate at the company level. For example, we require every BD to have the ability to build agents, because an agent is like someone who can help you make a PowerPoint — but the important part of a PowerPoint isn't the pretty slides, it's what words are on them.

An Yong: Does this make things harder or easier for the boss?

Jerry: Easier. Previously, information degraded layer by layer — now that's not a problem. Everyone's an owner.

Part 03

Business Model Is the Origin of Everything

An Yong: Whether it's SaaS or B2B in China, it sounds difficult right now. What do you think is the fundamental reason?

Jerry: B2C is a traffic business; B2B is a service logic. The former demands high product quality and high traffic costs. The latter emphasizes deep service and long-term cooperation — hard to generate positive revenue short-term, lots of running around initially, high demands on the individual.

But B2B business, especially with AI added, will never be a zero-or-one game. Even large models don't achieve 100% accuracy — maybe they solve 95% of a client's problems. That remaining 5% is where our value lies. Including emotional value — I often call myself CAO, Chief Apology Officer (laughs).

An Yong: Your PhD at Caltech was in neuroscience, and Fei-Fei Li was your direct senior. Why did you choose to return to China and start a SaaS/B2B company?

Jerry: Studying neuroscience, chips, or whatever deep tech — to me the difficulty is comparable to studying business. People instinctively assume things far from them are difficult, while business, being part of daily life, seems simple. But precisely because the latter is practical, ROI is easier to calculate and easier to execute. So I believe the deeper the technology, the less profitable it is. The most profitable model is the agency operations company. Our industry sits at this intersection of technology and business — we need technology to transform the industry, while the industry itself is close enough to ROI. That was my logic for choosing this sector.

An Yong: Usually when people discuss their entrepreneurial motivations, they give more emotional, grand answers.

Jerry: The essence of business is making money. I understand many founders say they want to do something cool. Ninety percent of cool things don't make money.

An Yong: Examples?

Jerry: First, AI glasses — their business model is problematic. If you're providing audio, headphones already exist. Unless you can achieve comfort for 24-hour wear, but that's hard to solve from a battery perspective. So its best form is essentially its current form. Second, autonomous driving — it has a paradox. For example: you take a taxi. If there's an accident, you and the human driver become a community of shared fate, jointly responsible. But AI won't be your community of shared fate. With that concern, would you trust AI?

So I've always felt many entrepreneurs see things, worry about problems, that only the top 0.01% of the world thinks about. Most people don't think this way. You'll notice especially in consumer sectors, the best entrepreneurs often aren't the smartest or most educated. For instance, no major restaurant chain that broke through was truly health-centered, because for most people, cheap comes first.

An Yong: What about large models? From a business model perspective, is it a good business?

Jerry: The essence of the large model business closely resembles cloud providers — and we all know that's a tough business model. Large models are essentially a hardware business model, asset-heavy. Comparatively, NVIDIA, selling them chips, has a good business.

An Yong: Why do you dislike the word "moat"?

Jerry: Because it's often misread. Technology isn't a moat. Customer resources aren't a moat. There's only one moat in the world: "scale up." And for a startup to begin scaling, you must quickly identify changes in the market. Recently many friends just starting out have asked my advice — this is my advice.

An Yong: What do you mean by quickly identifying changes in the market?

Jerry: The changes I'm talking about aren't those brought by AI. AI has spawned many new companies, but if these companies don't find a market, they'll quickly fail. I'm talking about systemic market changes like those brought by new energy vehicles — for example, the old car sales model and methods were completely revolutionized. We can now see that the entire new energy supply chain, top to bottom, produced many good companies. CATL is an example of a company that had prior accumulation and rapidly scaled up upon entering the new energy era. As an aside, I've been saying Trump brings exactly what entrepreneurs need most: change. He's a typical businessman. His daily up-and-down changes create many opportunities.

An Yong: So you view the measures since Trump took office as opportunities?

Jerry: People often feel the business environment is declining, but it's precisely such periods that allow certain companies to truly rise. Short video and short drama going overseas are typical examples of growth sectors born from change — if the international trade environment were good, companies might just do traditional trade. The advantage of such short videos is precisely that they don't rely on tariffs. Find a good entry point, execute quickly, plus mature AI technology — naturally they develop.

Now people think tariffs are a problem, but you can still make money going to America now, and with higher margins — the US auto industry's profit margins are already high. Even with 200% tariffs on Chinese products, you can still profit because competition has decreased. If there were originally ten Chinese companies competing, now there are only two or three. The competitive logic hasn't changed; there are just seven fewer competitors. You'll find that the best markets to enter now are the ones no one's in — we can seize first-mover advantage. If we price higher, no one cares, no one minds, we still make money. From my perspective, many people talk about going global without actually having gone, especially in B2B. I think B2C is slightly better because B2C has mature industrial chains — locals will help you open stores, handle local affairs; whether you make money depends on your capability. But B2B requires you to go yourself. It's hard. Many people haven't made that commitment.

Image source | Unsplash

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