Jiawei Gu

Jiawei Gu is the founder of Ling Universe (灵宇宙), a startup building what it calls a next-generation smart hardware OS—software that lets everyday devices "disappear" into daily life through AI-driven interaction rather than simply making them smarter . The company was founded in 2023 and moved fast: it closed three funding rounds within its first six months and debuted its Ling! product line at CES 2025, per a Linear Capital piece from early that year . By mid-2025, Ling Universe's "AI Companion Learning Cube" had topped AI toy sales charts during the 618 shopping festival and won a 2025 German Red Dot design award . Gu's own framing, in a Linear Capital interview, is that the real interaction revolution means devices vanishing into the background—not announcing their intelligence . Elsewhere's corpus does not cover his background prior to Ling Universe.