Zhejiang University
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Zhejiang University (浙江大学, Zhèjiāng Dàxué), often abbreviated as ZJU or Zheda, is a public research university in Hangzhou, China that is the academic anchor of the country's fastest growing artificial intelligence cluster: its alumni founded three of the six Hangzhou AI startups known as the Six Little Dragons, including DeepSeek.[1][3] Tracing its origins to the Qiushi Academy founded in 1897, ZJU is one of the oldest, largest, and most highly ranked universities in China and a member of the C9 League, the informal grouping of nine elite Chinese institutions that also includes Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.[2][6] By the mid 2020s ZJU was widely recognized as the academic anchor of Hangzhou's emergent AI cluster and as one of the most important talent pipelines in the broader China AI industry.[3]
The university's contribution to artificial intelligence runs along several tracks. Its College of Computer Science and Technology dates AI work to the late 1970s and was the first Chinese institution to enroll AI master's students.[4] Its alumni include the founders of three of the six Hangzhou AI dragons: DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng, DEEP Robotics' Zhu Qiuguo and Li Chao, and Manycore Tech's Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang.[3] By September 2024 the university had produced 102 executives at Chinese AI startups, ranking third nationally behind Tsinghua and Peking University.[3] Its faculty and graduates also seeded SUPCON Group, Hikvision, and Pinduoduo. A long running partnership with Alibaba Group, formalized through joint laboratories and the multi billion yuan Zhejiang Lab, produced Alibaba Cloud founder Wang Jian and underpinned much of the AI infrastructure work that culminated in the Tongyi Qianwen and Qwen model families.[23][25] ZJU also hosts the State Key Laboratory of CAD & Computer Graphics, the Humanoid Robot Innovation Research Institute, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, and the Turing Honors Class for elite AI undergraduates.[5] Where Tsinghua University anchors the Beijing AI cluster, ZJU anchors the Hangzhou cluster, and together the two institutions account for an outsized share of the founding teams behind China's most prominent foundation model and embodied AI startups.
Zhejiang University traces its origin to the Qiushi Academy (求是書院), established on May 21, 1897 by Lin Qi, the prefect of Hangzhou.[2] The first cohort numbered around 30 students. The name Qiushi literally means "to seek truth" and was inspired by the Yangmingist injunction that a gentleman learns only to know what is right. From the outset the academy taught arithmetic, physics (then called gezhi), and chemistry, and set up early laboratories. The motto Qiushi remains the university motto today, and after several reorganizations the school was officially renamed National Zhejiang University in 1928.[2]
The university's modern intellectual identity was shaped most decisively by Zhu Kezhen (Coching Chu), the meteorologist and geographer who served as president from 1936 to 1949.[2] During the Second Sino Japanese War, Zhu led the entire university on a westward migration of more than 2,500 kilometers to escape the Japanese invasion, eventually settling in Zunyi, Guizhou.[2] Zhu kept the university operating throughout the war and recruited many leading Chinese scientists of the era including the physicist Wang Ganchang and the mathematician Su Buqing. The journey is celebrated as a model of scholarly resilience, and ZJU's elite Chu Kochen Honors College is named after Zhu Kezhen.
After 1949 the central government reorganized higher education along Soviet lines. In 1952 ZJU was broken up into several specialized institutions, with engineering forming the new Zhejiang University and arts and sciences largely transferred to Fudan University in Shanghai.[2] ZJU operated as a polytechnic for nearly half a century. The modern Zhejiang University was formed in 1998 by the merger of four Hangzhou institutions: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou University, Zhejiang Agricultural University, and Zhejiang Medical University.[2] The merger, authorized by the State Council, recombined the disciplines split apart in 1952 and produced one of the most comprehensive research universities in China.[2]
Zhejiang University operates seven campuses: Zijingang, Yuquan, Xixi, Huajiachi, Zhijiang, Zhoushan (focused on marine science), and the International Campus in Haining.[1] The Zijingang Campus, opened in 2002, is the main campus and at roughly 8,700 mu (about 580 hectares) is the largest single university campus in mainland China.[2] Yuquan, the previous main campus, hosts much of the engineering and information science work, including the College of Computer Science and Technology and the State Key Laboratory of CAD & Computer Graphics.
The university enrolls more than 53,000 students, with over half at the postgraduate level, and employs around 4,500 full time faculty including more than 50 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.[1][2] Annual research expenditure exceeds 7 billion yuan, ranking ZJU among the top three Chinese universities alongside Tsinghua and Peking University.
In the 2026 Times Higher Education World University Rankings ZJU placed 39th globally and among the top five in mainland China; in the 2026 QS World University Rankings it placed 49th.[29][30] In the 2025 Nature Index annual table, which tracks contributions to high impact natural science publications, Zhejiang University placed 3rd worldwide and 2nd in the Asia Pacific region, ahead of every other Chinese university except the Chinese Academy of Sciences and trailing only Harvard.[31] This Nature Index ranking placed ZJU above Tsinghua, Stanford, and MIT for raw natural science output, an outcome that drew significant attention in international science press.[31] ZJU is one of the founding members of the C9 League, established in 1998 as part of Project 985.[6]
ZJU's engagement with computing predates that of most Chinese universities. The Department of Computer Science was established in 1978 under founding director He Zhijun, who explicitly prioritized AI theory research and new computer architectures from day one.[4] Within a few years ZJU became the first Chinese institution authorized to enroll master's students in artificial intelligence.[4]
The modern College of Computer Science and Technology comprises the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Computer Graphics and Image, Institute of Service Engineering, Institute of Network and Distributed Computing, Institute of Computer Software and Theory, and Institute of Cyber Systems and Control (joint with the College of Control Science and Engineering).[4] The college runs four flagship graduate programs covering Computer Science and Technology, Cyberspace Security, Software Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence. In 2019 ZJU became one of the first 35 Chinese universities to launch a dedicated undergraduate AI program and was approved by the State Council Academic Degrees Committee to establish China's first interdisciplinary AI degree. The college also runs the AI+X micro program, launched in April 2021 alongside five other east China universities, which embeds AI literacy in non computing majors and was profiled in Communications of the ACM as a model for cross disciplinary AI education.[39]
The Turing Honors Class (图灵班), opened in fall 2019 in the Chu Kochen Honors College, is ZJU's elite undergraduate program in computer science, AI, and information security.[3] The class admits a small annual cohort drawn from top gaokao performers. Students choose a track from computer science, artificial intelligence, or information security. The faculty team includes two members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a Turing Award winner with visiting status. The structure parallels Tsinghua University's Yao Class, although the Turing Class spans a slightly broader set of computing tracks. It sits inside the Chu Kochen Honors College (竺可桢学院), a cross departmental honors college named after the wartime president that admits the top one percent of incoming undergraduates. The mixed class within Chu Kochen, which selects students after their first year and lets them swap into any major, has produced an outsized share of ZJU's most successful alumni: Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek, Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang of Manycore Tech, and Colin Huang (Huang Zheng) of Pinduoduo all studied within Chu Kochen.[3]
| Faculty | Role | Field | Notable contributions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pan Yunhe | Professor, former president | AI, computer graphics, intelligent CAD | Drafted China's New Generation AI Development Plan, proposed AI 2.0, CAE academician, chief AI scientist of Zhejiang Lab |
| Wu Zhaohui | Professor, former president | Computer science, AI, big data | CAS academician, IEEE/CAAI Fellow, ZJU president 2015 to 2022 |
| Wu Fei | Director, Institute of AI | Multimedia analysis, cross media intelligence | Distinguished Teaching Award, leads Turing Class teaching |
| Bao Hujun | Professor, College of CS | Computer graphics, virtual reality | Director of CAD & CG Lab; advisor to Manycore founders |
| Zhang Guofeng | Professor, College of CS | 3D vision, SLAM, world models | Released open source InSpatio-WorldFM model |
| Xiong Rong | Professor, Control Science | Robotics, humanoid robotics | Director of Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center |
| Xiang Zhiyu | Professor, Information Science | Machine vision | Master's advisor to DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng |
| Cai Deng | Professor, College of CS | Machine learning, recommendation systems | Highly cited researcher, deep learning theory and applications |
| Chen Hongsheng | Dean, Information Science | Electromagnetic theory, AI applications | Dean of College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering |
The State Key Laboratory of CAD & Computer Graphics (CAD&CG) began construction in 1989 under the National Seventh Five Year Plan and was approved as a state key laboratory in 1990.[5] It is one of the oldest and most influential computer graphics research centers in China and was rated among the top tier state key labs in independent evaluations published in Science.[5] The lab's research spans CAD, geometric and visual algorithms, virtual and augmented reality, image and video understanding, and visual analysis.[5] It houses several internationally recognized groups including the GAPS (Graphics and Parallel Systems) Lab led by Kun Zhou. The CAD&CG lab is also one of the major training grounds for the founders of Manycore Tech and other Hangzhou spatial intelligence companies.
In 2024 ZJU launched the Humanoid Robot Innovation Research Institute (HIC-ZJU), a cross departmental institute dedicated to building humanoid robots that exceed human capabilities in movement and manipulation.[36] The institute is co directed by Xiong Rong of the College of Control Science and Engineering and serves as the academic core of the broader Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, funded primarily by SUPCON Group.[35]
The innovation center released the NAVIAI Navigator 2 humanoid robot in early 2025.[34] The robot stands 1.65 meters tall, weighs about 60 kilograms, has 41 degrees of freedom, and is rated at 275 TOPS of onboard AI compute, enabling real time perception and control for tasks ranging from giving speeches to making tea and playing chess.[34] The predecessor SUPCON Navigator α and Navigator 2 are profiled in the dedicated Zhejiang Humanoid Navigator 2 article.[35] By April 2025 the center had opened a factory in Haishu and announced plans to mass produce hundreds of humanoid robots that year.[35] In September 2025 the College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science established a joint embodied intelligence laboratory with Miracle Automation Engineering.[37] ZJU is one of seven Chinese universities that applied to launch a new undergraduate major in embodied intelligence in 2025.
Zhejiang Lab (also rendered as Zhijiang Lab in older sources) was founded in September 2017 in Hangzhou's AI Town as a joint research institution backed by the Zhejiang provincial government, Zhejiang University, and Alibaba Group.[25][26] The lab received roughly 30 billion yuan in initial government funding and was given approximately 247 acres for its campus.[26] Its mission spans five intelligent science and technology disciplines: intelligent perception, AI, intelligent computing, intelligent networks, and intelligent systems.[25]
Zhejiang Lab is led by Wang Jian, founder of Alibaba Cloud, a Chinese Academy of Engineering academician, and a ZJU alumnus and former faculty member.[24] Wang earned his PhD in engineering at ZJU and taught there before joining Microsoft Research Asia and then Alibaba in 2008.[23] He set up Alibaba Cloud in September 2009 and continues as chairman of Alibaba Group's technology committee.[23] Pan Yunhe, the former ZJU president and an early proponent of "AI 2.0," serves as chief AI scientist of Zhejiang Lab.[32]
By 2024 Zhejiang Lab employed roughly 4,200 researchers, with 93 percent holding doctoral degrees.[25] Its most widely publicized result is Darwin Monkey (Wukong), unveiled in 2025 as the world's first brain inspired computer powered by a dedicated neuromorphic chip with more than two billion neurons.[28] Darwin Monkey builds on the Darwin III brain inspired chip co developed by ZJU and Zhejiang Lab in 2023.[28]
The ZJU and Alibaba relationship extends well beyond Zhejiang Lab. The two organizations operate joint research labs covering quantum computing, frontier internet research, and natural language processing. In November 2023 Alibaba DAMO Academy donated its quantum computing laboratory and equipment to Zhejiang University, transferring substantial capability into the university as DAMO refocused on AI for agriculture, healthcare, and industrial applications.[27]
The entrepreneurial output of Zhejiang University is one of its most distinctive features. By September 2024 the university had produced 102 executives at Chinese AI startups, ranking third nationally behind Tsinghua and Peking University.[3] Three of the six Hangzhou AI dragons were founded by ZJU alumni.[3] As the university's own account of the cluster put it, "Among Hangzhou's rising 'Six Little Dragons,' the founders of DeepSeek, DEEP Robotics and Manycore Tech share a common origin: Zhejiang University."[3]
| Company | Founded | ZJU connection | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | July 2023 | Founder Liang Wenfeng holds BEng (2007) and MEng (2010) from ZJU | Open weight LLMs, reasoning models |
| DEEP Robotics | 2017 | Cofounders Zhu Qiuguo and Li Chao both hold ZJU PhDs; Zhu was a ZJU associate professor | Quadruped industrial robots, Jueying line |
| Manycore Tech (Coohom / Kujiale) | 2011 | Cofounders Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang met in the 2003 Chu Kochen mixed class | Spatial intelligence, 3D rendering |
| SUPCON Technology | 1993 | Founder Chu Jian was the youngest professor at ZJU; PhD from joint ZJU and Kyoto program | Industrial automation, DCS, industrial AI |
| Hikvision | 2001 | Heavy ZJU faculty and alumni in Hangzhou R&D | AI security cameras, video analytics |
| Pinduoduo | 2015 | Founder Colin Huang studied CS at Chu Kochen Honors College | E commerce, AI driven recommendation |
| Rotunbot | 2017 | Founder Wang You is associate professor at the College of Control Science | Spherical patrol robots, RT-G platform |
| Alibaba Cloud | 2009 | Founder Wang Jian holds ZJU PhD and was a ZJU faculty member | Cloud computing, Tongyi Qianwen and Qwen LLMs |
This list omits dozens of smaller AI and robotics startups with ZJU founders. A characteristic feature is the heavy presence of robotics and embodied AI firms, reflecting the strength of the College of Control Science and Engineering. Where the Tsinghua ecosystem skews toward foundation models, the ZJU ecosystem skews toward robotics, computer vision, spatial intelligence, and AI infrastructure.
Liang Wenfeng is the highest profile recent ZJU alumnus in the global AI industry.[11] Born in 1985 in Guangdong, Liang was admitted to Zhejiang University in 2002 at age 17 to study electronic information engineering.[11] He completed his bachelor's in 2007 and stayed on for a master's in information and communication engineering, which he completed in 2010.[11] His master's advisor, Professor Xiang Zhiyu, introduced him to machine vision and the broader field that would later become deep learning.[12] In an account published by the university, Liang credited that mentorship directly: "My supervisor, XIANG Zhiyu, introduced me to the field of machine vision. He helped me structure my study plan, and provided research training, often guiding me through the code line by line."[3]
After graduation Liang focused on quantitative finance, applying machine learning to trading.[12] In 2015 he co founded High Flyer, a quant hedge fund that grew to manage tens of billions of dollars and built one of the largest GPU clusters in private Chinese hands.[14] In July 2023 Liang spun out the AI research arm of High Flyer as DeepSeek, headquartered in Hangzhou.[13] DeepSeek released DeepSeek V2 in 2024 and the DeepSeek R1 reasoning model in early 2025; both used substantially less compute than comparable Western frontier models and reshaped global discussions about the cost trajectory of frontier AI.[13] The release of R1 in January 2025 triggered a sharp temporary correction in US AI infrastructure stocks.[14] Liang was invited to a high level meeting with Premier Li Qiang on the same day R1 launched.[12]
DEEP Robotics was founded in 2017 by Zhu Qiuguo and Li Chao, both ZJU alumni.[15] Zhu was born in 1982 in Haining, Zhejiang, completed his undergraduate degree in mechanical and electronic engineering at ZJU, and earned his PhD from the College of Control Science and Engineering.[15] He served as an associate professor at ZJU before founding the company.[15] Within a few months DEEP Robotics released the first generation of its quadruped robot, Jueying (绝影), named after Cao Cao's legendary horse.[15] The Jueying line evolved into a series of industrial inspection robots used in oil and gas facilities, power plants, mines, and infrastructure tunnels. The company raised a $71 million Series C in late 2025 with backers including the Zhejiang University Education Foundation and announced plans for an IPO in 2026.[16] Zhu has credited his early participation in RoboCup with shaping his trajectory; ZJU has run a sustained RoboCup effort since the early 2000s.
Manycore Tech was founded in 2011 by Huang Xiaohuang (Victor Huang), Chen Hang, and Zhu Hao.[17] Huang and Chen were classmates and roommates in the 2003 mixed class at the Chu Kochen Honors College, while Zhu Hao came from Tsinghua and the three reconnected at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.[17] Manycore launched its flagship product Kujiale in 2013, a 3D rendering platform for interior design, with international version Coohom in 2018.[17] The company built early differentiation on GPU based real time rendering, drawing directly on the work of the State Key Laboratory of CAD & Computer Graphics, where Huang spent time as a student under Professor Bao Hujun. By the mid 2020s Manycore had pivoted to position itself as a spatial intelligence company. In April 2025 it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as the world's first listed pure spatial intelligence company, with a market value that briefly exceeded HK$35 billion.[18]
SUPCON Group, short for super control, was founded in 1993 in Hangzhou by Chu Jian, then the youngest professor at Zhejiang University.[19] Chu was admitted to ZJU at age 15 and earned his PhD through a joint training program operated by ZJU and Kyoto University.[19] SUPCON began as a producer of distributed control systems (DCS), an automation segment that was dominated by international vendors such as Siemens, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Honeywell.[20] By 2013 SUPCON had become the largest DCS player in the Chinese market.[20] In the 2020s SUPCON repositioned itself around industrial AI, integrating large model based reasoning into its automation stack and funding the Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center that produced the NAVIAI Navigator series.[20] The company's industrial agents and embodied AI platform are discussed in the SUPCON Technology article. Chu later served as a vice president of Zhejiang University from 2005.[19]
Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, established in 2001, is the world's largest manufacturer of video surveillance equipment and one of the most important Chinese AI hardware companies.[21] While its founders Chen Zongnian and Hu Yangzhong came from the CETC 52nd Research Institute rather than ZJU, the company is headquartered in Hangzhou and recruits a very large share of its R&D workforce from Zhejiang University.[21] ZJU's strength in computer vision and embedded systems made it a natural pipeline for Hikvision engineers, with joint research projects on crowd analytics, license plate recognition, and AI accelerated edge inference. The company is profiled in Hikvision.
Colin Huang (Huang Zheng) began studying computer science at ZJU's Chu Kochen Honors College at age 18, was selected as a Melton Foundation fellow as a freshman, then completed graduate work at the University of Wisconsin Madison and worked at Google before returning to China.[22] In 2015 he founded Pinduoduo in Shanghai, which grew into one of the most valuable e commerce platforms in China and the parent of the international app Temu.[22] Pinduoduo's recommendation engines and its early embrace of large scale machine learning draw on the engineering culture Huang absorbed at ZJU and Google. See Pinduoduo for details.
The NetEase founder Ding Lei is from Ningbo, Zhejiang but earned his bachelor's at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, not at ZJU. He is sometimes loosely associated with the ZJU ecosystem because of NetEase's Hangzhou headquarters and the company's deep recruiting relationship with ZJU. NetEase's AI division, Youdao, hires heavily from ZJU's NLP and machine learning groups, as discussed in NetEase.
The term Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou (杭州六小龙) emerged in late 2024 as a label for the cluster of high impact technology startups founded in or relocated to Hangzhou during the 2020s.[7] The six are usually listed as Game Science, DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics, DEEP Robotics, BrainCo, and Manycore Tech.[7][38] Three of the six (DeepSeek, DEEP Robotics, and Manycore Tech) were founded by ZJU alumni; a fourth (Unitree) is led by Zhejiang native Wang Xingxing, who studied at Shanghai University but built much of his career and supplier network in Hangzhou.[3][8] The remaining two (Game Science and BrainCo) are not directly tied to ZJU, although both benefit from the Hangzhou tech labor market that ZJU helps anchor.
In January 2025 the Chinese government formalized the Hangzhou cluster through the Hangzhou AI Industry Chain High Quality Development Action Plan, targeting more than 2,000 new high tech enterprises, more than 300 major projects, and more than 300 billion yuan (about US$40 billion) of annual investment.[10] The plan explicitly references Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Lab as the academic foundation for the cluster.[10] The ZJU centric Hangzhou cluster is increasingly compared with the Tsinghua centric Beijing cluster as the two main poles of Chinese AI activity.[9] Beijing dominates frontier LLM startups (Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, Baichuan, MiniMax). Hangzhou dominates embodied AI, robotics, and a significant LLM presence anchored by DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen line.[9]
ZJU researchers contribute to numerous open source projects and benchmarks. Recent highlights include InSpatio-WorldFM, a real time frame generation world model open sourced in 2025 by Professor Zhang Guofeng's team; the Darwin III brain inspired chip and the Darwin Monkey neuromorphic computer jointly developed with Zhejiang Lab; widely used toolkits in 3D vision, point cloud processing, neural rendering, and SLAM anchored by the State Key Laboratory of CAD & CG; and research on large model alignment, embodied AI safety, and adversarial robustness from the Intelligent Systems Security (IS2) lab.[28]
Zhejiang University maintains an extensive network of international partnerships. Major partners include the University of Edinburgh (which co operates a joint institute at the International Campus in Haining), the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (joint engineering programs at Haining), Imperial College London, the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University (with which ZJU co administered SUPCON founder Chu Jian's PhD), and Stanford University.[1] ZJU is a member of the Worldwide Universities Network, the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, and the Global MOOC and Online Education Alliance.[1] Many ZJU AI faculty hold or have held visiting appointments at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.
The scale of ZJU's contribution to the Chinese AI economy has prompted both celebration and concern in domestic press. ZJU is widely credited as one of the most successful examples of a Chinese university generating an entrepreneurial ecosystem comparable to those of Stanford or MIT, and the Hangzhou Six Little Dragons are routinely cited as evidence that elite Chinese science and engineering education can produce globally competitive technology startups outside the traditional Beijing and Silicon Valley axes.[3]
Critics argue that the dense overlap between ZJU faculty, alumni, adjacent venture capital, and the Hangzhou municipal government has produced a regional ecosystem that is unusually inwardly oriented. Caixin and Sixth Tone have published analyses asking whether Hangzhou's AI scene risks becoming a closed network in which non ZJU founders struggle for funding.[38][40] Defenders point to the entry of outside firms such as Game Science as evidence that the cluster remains permeable. A recurring theme is the comparison with Tsinghua University: the Tsinghua AI ecosystem is older and more concentrated on foundation model startups, while the ZJU ecosystem is younger and more oriented toward robotics, vision, and applied AI. Founders, investors, and engineers regularly move between the two networks, and several joint research projects connect them.