Yilun Chen

Yilun Chen is the founder and CEO of Tashi Intelligent Navigation (它石智航), an embodied intelligence startup that emerged in late 2024 after he left his position as chief scientist at Huawei's intelligent vehicle business unit . He co-founded the company with Li Zhenyu, formerly head of Baidu's autonomous driving division, and Ding Wenchao, a former Huawei "genius talent" recruit, among others .

Chen's path into robotics began after completing his PhD at Tsinghua University, when he spent roughly five years at Eaton building a global innovation center in Shanghai from scratch—what he described as a "from zero to one" experience of converting an underground garage into a lab and recruiting a worldwide team . He later joined Huawei, where he worked alongside Ding Wenchao, whom he regarded as "the best" among Huawei's autonomous driving talent .

Tashi raised $120 million in angel funding and a subsequent $122 million round within its first six months, with Linear Capital among its backers—though Chen has framed fundraising less as capital-raising than as "a process of sharing ideas and making friends" . He sees embodied intelligence as the next decade's defining industrial upgrade, positioning Tashi to build "trustworthy super-embodied intelligent systems" that integrate physical-world AI with general robotics .