China's Robotaxi Industry: Unlocked (w/ CFO @ Pony.ai Dr. Leo Wang)

Sophia Tung (0:00)

Hey there, you're listening to the Ride AI Podcast, where we talk about news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and mobility. I'm your host, Sophia Tung. Now, you might already know today's guest. After all, he was on my Chinese Century panel at Ride AI 2026

If you haven't watched that, it's available on the Ride AI YouTube channel, so you should definitely watch that first for more context.

Dr. Leo Wang is the CFO of Pony AI, one of China's most established robotaxi operators. And a founding member of the company. And before that, he was at Baidu, leading their mapping and localization efforts. And before that, he was at IBM working on big data. So you might say he's a little bit of a data nerd. At Ride AI back in April, Leo joined me and Tu Li from Sino Auto Insights for a panel on the state of China's AV industry. But the industry has evolved so much since then, so I wanted to get him back to talk about China, about Europe, about hardware, how pony operates, just everything. Leo, welcome to the show.

Leo Wang (1:05)

Hi, Sophia. Nice talking to you again. And hello, everyone. Nice to have this opportunity to share with you guys about the whole industry. Yes, definitely this year, there's quite a lot of progress, updates and news, and also about the pony AI in this industry. Yes.

Sophia Tung (1:22)

Yeah, and I want to dive into all of that. But first, I want to talk to you about yourself a little bit because you, I took the liberty of looking up your resume, and it's very impressive. So you've got a Ph.D. And correct me if I'm wrong at any of this, but you've got a Ph.D. in multi-dimensional data and mobile localization services from USC. That's University of Southern California. I don't even know what that means. You were on Baidu's self-driving mapping team before Pony even existed. And then at Pony, you actually, you ran the map and localization module yourself, right? Before running the US operations and then the Shanghai R&D Center.

I think, yeah, that's a wild path from being a hands-on engineer to, you know, now you're CFO. But I believe your engineering career, it goes back even further than that, because you've been doing like large-scale data systems since your first job at Shanghai Online, right? That's like Shanghai Re Xian, right? Back in the late 90s.

So what made you want to jump from, you know, doing the engineering to doing the money?

Leo Wang (2:42)

Yeah, so I would say definitely, I come from a very diverse background and experience. So you asked about my, like a PhD focus.

In layman term, actually, that's about map data and also about finding the entities from your current location. For example, if you want to find your closest gas station, that type of question, and you are on route, then how can I come back with a efficient, you know, processing, give you the best results? So that type of question, when the map is becoming more available, accessible to consumers, of course, that become a very interesting topic. So my PhD work at that time, we've already seen some of the map service, they started to providing the routing information. But on top of the routing information, probably you also want to find some interesting points, you know, on route. And then how can we answer this on a larger scale and more efficiently? So that was my PhD focus. Of course, after that, if you look at the whole thing, it involves some data processing, it also involves some map related, we call them multidimensional in academia term. So I, at that time, of course, see the industry have a lot of effort putting into the big data processing part. So I became part of that by joining IBM. But later on, the whole industry, of course, evolves, AI becomes more and more of a theme. And then for autonomous driving, definitely there is a map related, there is a location related.

So kind of like leveraging my experience on big data and also my research background, from the mapping related knowledge, I turn into so-called a map and localization module into autonomous driving effort. Of course, when we founded this Pony AI as a startup, at that time, there is very few of us working at the company. So we definitely want to work here, work there. There's so many work we need to do.

But for me, I think because I have exposed to many fields, and I realized for this whole company, probably the kind of like a demanding part from the company perspective, at different stage, probably will be different.