Haoyu Zhu

Haoyu Zhu (朱浩宇, Ryan Zhu) is a 19-year-old entrepreneur and hacker from Hangzhou, best known as the founder of AdventureX, which grew into China's largest hackathon . He launched the event in 2024 as a 17-year-old high schooler, drawing 38 team members and sponsorship from investors including Linear Capital . His trajectory began with self-taught Python, nearly 10 hackathons, and indie apps including an AI tool for skipping online classes .

After a five-month absence from the public eye in China, he re-emerged in late 2025 with Photon AI, a project that packages AI agents as iMessage-style interfaces . That same year he met with 25 first- and second-tier dollar investors to pitch the venture, though one early AdventureX supporter reportedly told him it was "not as cool as AdventureX" . Elsewhere's elselier column, which profiled him in December 2025, described him as capturing a moment when Chinese AI needed "Silicon Valley spirit" and noted his self-assessment mixed humility with swagger—rating his own hustle lower than the writer would have .