Linear Capital Portfolio Company "Aosogna" CEO Interview: The Disruptor Redefining Intelligent Industrial Aesthetics

• Estimated reading time: 13 minutes -

Preface

In today's booming intelligent industrial sector, aesthetics, humanities, and art are rarely discussed concepts. To most people, "beauty and humanity" seem like luxuries far removed from technology or industry — or elements that don't directly align with tech industry monetization models.

But one scientist-founder focused on industrial design aesthetics is trying to shatter this perception: Dr. Yang Ji, founder and CEO of OXOGN, who "graduated" from his position at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to return to China, firmly believes that the entire process from design to R&D of tech products should integrate humanistic and artistic beauty. "We hope to convey the humanistic spirit of innovation, care, and design aesthetics to every user through countless subtle details in our products."

In fact, as a startup, OXOGN focuses on the computer-aided design and engineering market, specializing in professional software and dedicated hardware solutions for intelligent product design. Its industry commands a global market size reaching tens of billions of dollars, with core technologies covering intelligent products in aerospace, automotive, robotics, shipping, and other sectors. Unlike most industrial software companies, OXOGN's product philosophy places unusual emphasis on aesthetic elements, elevating the team's deep thinking on industrial aesthetics to equal importance with technical factors — a clear embodiment of "industrial R&D and design" cross-disciplinary thinking.

To this end, OXOGN has built an R&D team composed of both artists and scientists, choosing to root itself in a lane house office in Shanghai's French Concession. Compared to the stereotypical tech startup, OXOGN's workspace exudes a strong literary and artistic atmosphere — on the office wall hangs German industrial designer Dieter Rams's ten principles of good design.

OXOGN's office in a Shanghai French Concession lane house

Precisely because of this unique product and business philosophy, OXOGN has completed two rounds of financing totaling several million dollars. At the end of 2023, Dr. Ji received an honor from his alma mater — the 2023 "TUM Ambassador," or Technical University of Munich Ambassador. As a presidential award from one of Germany's top universities, this honor is no small feat; past recipients include Nobel laureates and the president of Imperial College London. Dr. Ji's award made him the first non-academic in the university's more than 150-year history to receive this distinction as an entrepreneur. Speaking of receiving the award personally from President Prof. Dr. Thomas F. Hofmann at the annual concert, Dr. Ji was deeply moved: "When I first enrolled at TUM in 2000, I didn't know that right above the freshman registration office was the president's office. From the first floor to the second floor, it took me 23 years."

TUM Ambassador 2023 Award Ceremony

The OXOGN team's entrepreneurial goal is to help more people create high-tech intelligent products infused with humanistic and artistic elements.

How are aesthetics and humanistic concepts shaped in the intelligent technology industry? Quadrant Think Tank made a special trip to visit Dr. Ji, who worked as a senior scientist at DLR for 10 years — one of the very few Chinese scientists at the German Aerospace Center — and is also an expert in Modelica, the simulation design computer language, and the only Chinese doctoral student of Professor Martin Otter, president of the Modelica Association. Drawing on his personal journey and entrepreneurial practice, he shared with us the accumulated thinking behind his decision to start a business after years of academic exploration, as well as his dialectical reflections on aesthetics, humanity, and technology.

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01 The Scientist's Entrepreneurial Challenge Doesn't Come from Commercialization

Quadrant: You worked at DLR as a senior scientist for many years, participating in numerous EU and industry research projects related to Modelica technology. How did this experience influence your decision to found OXOGN?

Dr. Ji: Modelica is a computer language for physical behavior simulation, a very important underlying technology that I frequently used in my work at DLR. Simply put, Modelica describes physical behavior as a computer engine that can model dynamic behaviors across electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, thermal, and other physical domains in intelligent products. Many games also have physics engines, but compared to game physics engines, Modelica is a much more rigorous scientific physics engine.

Applying Modelica technology is an excellent solution to address the vast majority of pain points in robot design and R&D. However, existing industrial design software based on Modelica technology, such as products from Dassault or Siemens, already has 20 to 30 years of history, with many industry pain points urgently needing resolution. So I wanted to create a completely new product that could disrupt existing tools, hoping to revolutionarily improve the user experience in designing future intelligent products.

DLR is certainly a great job with excellent environment and conditions in every aspect, and I gained tremendously there. But over time, I gradually realized it wasn't a place suited for building products — it focuses more on innovating and breaking through underlying technology, while I wanted to create products that most people could actually use. The technical capabilities I accumulated during these ten years at DLR, especially in underlying technology R&D, give our team particularly clear insight into where the technical boundaries of product innovation lie when developing products, and consequently a very precise understanding of what degree of product development can be achieved. I believe this is an essential skill for a tech startup CEO.

Quadrant: As a scientist-turned-entrepreneur, what was the biggest challenge in your transition? How did you overcome it?

Dr. Ji: This is a question I'm often asked — many government leaders and investors are concerned and thinking about it. The common worry is that scientist-turned-entrepreneurs aren't good at commercialization, marketing, sales, and customer relations.

But I believe that if the product itself is excellent enough, the challenges in commercialization won't be particularly high. Excellent scientists and great entrepreneurs don't differ much in the qualities they need to possess; rather, they share more commonalities — resilience, innovation, rebelliousness, patience, pursuit of perfection, and even kindness.

Scientists are accustomed to contributing better scientific methods or solutions in their research fields with government or corporate funding support; the essence of this work model is consulting and service. For entrepreneurs, the most important mission is to make good products. So beyond the qualities mentioned above, entrepreneurs also need the talent and conviction to build excellent products. That is, the transition from scientist to entrepreneur, from the inherent consulting service model to a product creation model, and successfully building a good product — this is the biggest challenge, even exceeding commercialization. In my view, scientists who want to build good companies should learn from excellent artists, just as they pursue their paintings without end, they should pursue products with ultimate dedication. Our original intention in starting this business was to create world-class great products.

Quadrant: At the end of last year, you were awarded the honorary title of "Technical University of Munich Ambassador." What significance and impact does this have for you personally and for the company?

Dr. Ji: Since 2013, TUM has selected a group of world-class scientists each year and awarded them the honorary title of "TUM Ambassador," recognizing their achievements in future-oriented research fields and their contributions to building TUM's global community.

Having the fortune to become, in the tenth year, the first non-academic in history to receive this honor as an entrepreneurial businessperson, I was tremendously excited and deeply felt that my entrepreneurial choice received enormous recognition and encouragement from my alma mater, also leaving OXOGN's mark in the development history of this top German university with over 150 years of history.

During the two-day award activities, I had in-depth exchanges with the other four selected ambassadors this year and university leadership. Although everyone came from different regions of the world with different professional backgrounds, we all shared common concern and discussion about how to reduce childhood cancer incidence rates, solve energy supply and education in underdeveloped African regions, and other global issues. This beautiful vision dedicated to the common progress of human society left a deep impression on me, and it is also OXOGN's most important spiritual core.

This honor's significance for us mainly has two aspects. On one hand, it makes us more firm and confident on our entrepreneurial path. TUM historically hasn't particularly emphasized rankings, but in recent years, the university has increasingly encouraged student innovation and entrepreneurship, even proposing to manage the university like a business. In 2023, the university's QS ranking surged to 37th, with a future goal of becoming a top-ten global university. The recognition and support from our alma mater gives us more confidence and assurance. On the other hand, this honor will become powerful backing for the company's global expansion. When we seek global commercial support or cooperation with top research institutions in the future, this honor will provide us with the most direct facilitation. First, as a TUM Ambassador, I automatically become a lifetime member of TUM's Institute of Advanced Study. Additionally, starting from 2024, I will establish new research projects and courses at TUM as a guest scientist, allowing OXOGN's latest tools to be applied here in practice, thus taking the first step for rapid product promotion in the European region. Currently, a number of world-class clients including DLR, TUM, Daimler, BMW, Bosch Group, and COMAC have confirmed they will become our early customers at the product launch in early 2024.

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02 Taste Is a Form of Productivity

Quadrant: In your product philosophy, aesthetic and humanistic artistic elements hold important positions in tech product design. Why do you value this so highly?

Dr. Ji: Because first of all, what we're making is a design tool, and this tool can be used to design future intelligent products, such as service robots. We hope these future intelligent products will be able to move people's hearts — only then can they be called great products. Therefore, the design tools we provide should themselves be able to move people's hearts, and so they must incorporate aesthetic and humanistic artistic elements.

I want to emphasize that aesthetics and technology themselves are not mutually exclusive. People's subconscious easily separates the two, as if aesthetics belongs to art academies and technology belongs to engineering universities. But in real life, we can't help but notice that aesthetic design's influence on tech products is everywhere.

I'm particularly fond of the concept of "emotional design" proposed by Hartmut Esslinger, founder of the world-class design firm frog design — a successful product should be able to touch people's emotions and reach their hearts. For example, Apple's products are designs that can move people's hearts.

Aesthetics is the most direct and intuitive way to touch people's hearts, so our products themselves should first possess aesthetic qualities. We believe that only under beautiful design tools can beautiful designs emerge.

Quadrant: In this regard, are there companies or brands you admire or benchmark against? What is OXOGN's aesthetic style?

Dr. Ji: I believe Apple and Sony are both very great companies, and their product design made me realize that "taste" is productivity. We're also quite confident in our own taste, believing it can become a key factor in attracting and moving users.

All OXOGN products are browser-based, but this doesn't simply mean deploying existing software from local environments to browser environments. We believe web-based tools should seek more transformation. Apple and Sony's designs have given us much inspiration, and I hope our tools can achieve simplicity, ease of use, and timeless classic appeal.

So I'm particularly fond of German industrial designer Dieter Rams — on OXOGN's office wall are posted his ten principles of good design. His designs, through extensive沉淀 and reflection, contain meticulously subtle surprises, that quiet temperament that can bring warmth and emotion to people. This is also what we pursue.

Quadrant: How do you view brand building and marketing for industrial tech companies? How does the role of aesthetic elements and humanized design in enhancing product user experience and building emotional connections with users manifest in OXOGN's brand strategy?

Dr. Ji: OXOGN places great importance on brand marketing. We hope to create OXOGN products' unique DNA — in the future, when users see any of our products, whether software tools or hardware products, they can immediately perceive that this is made by OXOGN. Of course, this still needs gradual accumulation.

I have to say that the words "industrial tech company" seem in popular discourse to be portrayed as far from daily life, but this isn't actually the case. In brand building, we want to break this stereotype. So whether in products or in PR and brand promotional materials, there are no academic professional terms — only "plain language" that ordinary people can understand. I often emphasize to the team not to use those scientist-summarized terms that only a few experts understand. We want to make things that people consider distant and inaccessible become easy to understand — this is also the goal we hope to achieve.

Furthermore, we plan to regularly share design cases and news on social media in the future, or build a community platform where everyone has the opportunity to try innovation, freely sharing ideas and works, rather than relying solely on traditional tech industry trade shows to promote and display our product features.

We hope to create brand "consistency." Consistency can establish a clear brand tone. OXOGN's products hope to reduce users' cognitive burden and learning costs through "consistency" — this is the differentiation of OXOGN's one-stop service from other products. In summary, our core marketing logic is to promote the experience users can obtain, not to talk about product features.

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03 Using "Kindness" to Unite the Team

Quadrant: What do you value most when selecting team members? Especially regarding the balance between art and technology, and between design and innovation?

Dr. Ji: This really hits on a current pain point — selecting team members as a startup is truly not easy. The biggest difficulty lies in the balance between art and technology. We hope team members have both technical backgrounds and artistic sensibility, so the first thing I value most is team members' cross-disciplinary backgrounds. Second, we equally value whether this person is kind. Here, kindness doesn't refer to simple good or evil, but more to the temperament and substance they convey. Tech companies have no shortage of clever minds, but to make a company strong and its products move people's hearts requires upholding kind values and a team that identifies with these values.

Quadrant: Is OXOGN's team a diverse team? What management challenges has this diversity also brought? How do you respond to them?

Dr. Ji: Currently, designers account for 40% of OXOGN team members, including 2 German designers, while most others are technical developers with IT backgrounds. So from whatever perspective, we are a diverse team. However, I haven't felt too many management challenges from diversity so far. On one hand, OXOGN employees more or less have some international background, whether in education or work experience — everyone has experience interacting and dealing with people from different cultural backgrounds. On the other hand, thanks to flat management and emphasis on corporate culture building, our team can easily reach consensus on company development goals.

OXOGN is committed to becoming a company driven by product design innovation with continuous pursuit of excellence. The core of all our advocated philosophies is letting users feel the care conveyed by products. I'm particularly fond of a quote from the Beatles — The love you get is equal to the love you give.

Two books Dr. Ji recommends reading recently:

1. A Fine Line by Hartmut Esslinger
2. The Kitchen by Studio Olafur Eliasson