Jerry Ye

Jerry Ye (叶生晅) is the founder and CEO of Whale 帷幄, a Chinese marketing technology company that has raised over $60 million in Series C1 and C2 funding with Linear Capital increasing its stake . He holds a PhD in engineering from Zhejiang University, a master's in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech, and bachelor's degrees in computer science, economics, and biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia, and previously worked as a data scientist at Meta building large-scale machine learning infrastructure .

In a 2025 interview with 暗涌Waves, Ye described his commercial philosophy in blunt terms: "the essence of business is making money" and argued that "90% of very cool things don't make money" . He views Whale's positioning at the intersection of technology and operations as deliberately chosen for its proximity to measurable ROI, contrasting it with deep tech research where returns are harder to realize . On competitive strategy, he rejects the common framing of "moats," contending that the only true barrier is the ability to "scale up" by rapidly identifying market shifts—citing the new energy vehicle industry's disruption of traditional auto sales as a model .