Zhigang Chen

Zhigang Chen is the founder and CEO of HeTan Intelligence (合碳智能), a Shanghai-based startup building AI-powered robotic systems for pharmaceutical R&D labs . He spent roughly a year teaching himself chemistry and pharmaceutical science to bridge the gap between his engineering background and the needs of lab scientists, visiting facilities firsthand to understand their workflow bottlenecks .

Before founding HeTan, Chen held senior roles across China's internet and healthcare sectors: he was WuXi AppTec's first Chief Digital Officer, where he led AI and digital transformation efforts and saw firsthand how "physical execution" became the scaling bottleneck in CRO growth ; founder of Tencent's medical big data lab ; and chief architect and head of algorithms at Alibaba Health . He also worked in Silicon Valley earlier in his career .

HeTan Intelligence, founded in June 2022 , has developed Talos (also referred to as LabBot), a robotic system for automated drug molecule purification that the company says performs at the level of a human expert with ten years of experience in specific scenarios . The startup raised a 50 million yuan funding round in March 2026, with Yunqi Capital among its backers . Chen's broader vision is to apply a "software-defined hardware" approach across the drug development lifecycle, moving from early-stage R&D into preclinical ADME studies and eventually GxP-compliant production .