Tao Zhang

Tao Zhang is a serial entrepreneur and AI product leader currently best known as co-founder of Manus, the general-purpose AI agent that launched in March 2025 . He first drew attention in earlier years as an angel investor in Tigerobo, a natural-language-processing startup where he invested alongside Gaorong Capital and Dianping founder Zhang Tao . More recently he has been a product partner at Monica.im, the AI assistant company, and has spoken publicly about the creation of DeepSeek R1 during a period when, as he put it, he spent the entire 2025 Spring Festival "scrolling information on my phone, watching domestic reactions by day and American reactions by night" . In late 2025 he appeared alongside ZhenFund managing partner Dai Yusen and Kimi president Zhang Yutong at a Tsinghua University forum, where he addressed the controversy around Manus's launch video and explained why the product had not been replaced by competitors . Elsewhere's corpus does not cover his educational background or earlier career history.