Deli Zhao

Deli Zhao is the founder of XPENG AEROHT (小鹏汇天), the flying-car company that grew out of a decade-long personal obsession with flight. Born in 1978 in a farming family near Dongting Lake in Hunan province, he spent his childhood watching crop-dusting Y-5 planes and studying how dragonflies could hover and reverse in mid-air—questions that would later shape his company's technical agenda . After making his first million running restaurants in Dongguan, he poured everything into aviation, starting with model aircraft and drones in 2013 before moving to manned vehicles in 2016 . By his own account, the two years he spent broke and tinkering in a lab were the happiest of his life, even as he set a hard stop at age 40 if the machines still couldn't fly .

The breakthrough came in June 2018, when he finally got his early flying motorcycle airborne after roughly 1,500 test flights and dozens of crashes . That vehicle caught the attention of Xpeng Motors' He Xiaopeng, who visited Zhao in Dongguan in mid-2020, took a ride, and moved the operation to Guangzhou that October to formalize a partnership . SoulCapital's Yan Han became an investor in XPENG AEROHT's Series A in 2021 . By 2024 the company was described as Asia's largest flying-car firm; by mid-2026, Zhao had built it to roughly 2,000 people and shifted from flying daily himself to recruiting talent, designing systems, and navigating regulatory frameworks for China's emerging low-altitude economy . His own framing of the transition: "Before it was interest-driven; now it's responsibility-driven" .