Fangbo Tao

Fangbo Tao is the founder and CEO of Mindverse, a Chinese AI startup building what he calls "identity models" — AI systems trained on a user's memories, emotions, and values to create personalized digital companions . His path to entrepreneurship began after a research career that spanned Microsoft Research, Facebook, and Alibaba's DAMO Academy, where he created a neuro-symbolic lab .

Academically, Tao holds a bachelor's from Tsinghua and a PhD from UIUC in data mining, where he worked under Jiawei Han . He founded Mindverse in early 2022 after GPT-3's release, initially launching MindOS — a digital-agent platform that predated ByteDance's Coze by a year — before pivoting toward more personal AI products . The company's overseas app Me.bot, launched in May 2024, had reached nearly a million users by mid-2025; its open-source successor Second Me gained over 10,000 GitHub stars within three weeks of release in March 2025 .

Tao's technical approach draws explicitly on neuroscience: he models AI memory formation on how the human brain indexes experiences, with nightly "digestion" cycles that update each user's identity model . This "brain-inspired" direction, which he began advocating in 2021, has made him one of the few Chinese AI founders tracked by The Information, though 暗涌Waves noted that he remains a polarizing figure in China's founder community — "difficult to summarize with just 'success' or 'failure'" .