James Peng

James Peng is the co-founder and CEO of Pony.ai, the autonomous driving company he started in late 2016 with Lou Tiancheng after both left Baidu's autonomous vehicle division . At Baidu, Peng had been one of the first members of the company's U.S. research lab and held the rare T11 engineer rank, serving as an architect for Baidu's self-driving program .

Peng's fundraising approach for Pony.ai's launch was notably selective—he called just four investors for the first round, with Sequoia and IDG committing . Sequoia partner Zhou Kui, whom Peng had met during a visit to Baidu's U.S. research lab, became a key early backer; Sequoia went on to lead four consecutive rounds and remains Pony.ai's largest financial investor . In 2020, Peng spent much of the year flying to Japan for extended negotiations that secured a critical $400 million investment from Toyota at a $3 billion valuation, a deal he described as "slowly heating water" rather than having a single decisive moment .

Pony.ai's path to public markets was interrupted when its planned 2021 IPO was halted by the SEC's suspension of Chinese company listings, a period Peng later acknowledged as posing "quite a big challenge" for the team . The company eventually listed on Nasdaq in November 2024 as the "first Robotaxi stock," with Peng noting that over eight years the company had "led the industry through cycles" . Less than a year later, in November 2025, Pony.ai completed a dual-primary listing in Hong Kong, which Peng framed as a pivotal step in the company's global capital strategy as it approached large-scale commercialization .