Yang Jun, co-founder of Meituan, has founded an AI education company and secured 60 million yuan in investment.

"There are certain choices in life that, if made too early without being fully understood, will lead to path deviations that often require enormous time cost, opportunity cost, and even psychological cost to make up for."

In December 2025, the 20th anniversary of the founding of Xiaonei.com was celebrated. Though times have changed, Xiaonei.com, as the first project of Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, that was truly known to the public and achieved phased success in his entrepreneurial journey, still has special significance.

Those former partners who fought side by side also reunited on this occasion. Over the dinner, everyone asked Yang Jun, their old partner who had worked with them for ten years, about his latest progress in starting a new business.

After listening to Yang Jun's sharing, Wang Xing quite approved of his idea, saying that it was also something he had always wanted to do before.

No more details of that gathering are known to the public. However, 36Kr noticed that more than two months later, the figures of former senior executives from the Meituan system quietly appeared in the shareholder list of Yang Jun's entrepreneurial project: Lai Binqiang and Gan Jiawei.

What is more noteworthy is that Yang Jun's new business is positioned in the AI education sector, where he founded Beijing Qihang New Future Technology Co., Ltd. The company was established in November 2024 with a registered capital of 11.235843 million yuan, and Zhu Xiaolan is its legal representative.

According to the company's official website, Qihang New Future has completed a financing of 60 million yuan.

Yang Jun, Founder and CEO of Qihang New Future, delivering a speech at the Future Education and Career Development Conference. The picture is from Qihang New Future's social media account.

To understand Yang Jun's this choice, we may have to start from his past experiences.

Yang Jun is a serial entrepreneur. He was born in 1984, a native of Jiangxi Province. He was admitted to Tsinghua University in 2000 (he obtained both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University), and is Wang Xing's junior fellow apprentice at Tsinghua University.

In 2004, he joined a team and started his first entrepreneurial attempt, which ended hastily (at that time, the entrepreneurial team he was in received investment due to the Tsinghua University Entrepreneurship Competition, but eventually disbanded due to internal conflict).

In 2005, after getting to know Wang Xing, he suspended his studies and joined Xiaonei.com, becoming the fourth partner of Xiaonei.com (the first three partners are Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen and Lai Binqiang respectively). The book *Nine Failures and One Success* quoted the evaluation of Yang Jun from Wang Huiwen, co-founder of Meituan: "Wang Huiwen believes that Yang Jun's joining was a major turning point for this team, injecting strong offline execution capability into the team, which is crucial no matter for Xiaonei.com or Meituan."

After that, he experienced the entrepreneurial journeys of Xiaonei.com, Fanfou.com, Hainei.com and Meituan.com — however, he was not present all the time, and there were periods of leaving and returning to the team. In April 2009, he left Fanfou.com for family reasons; in 2010, he was invited by Wang Xing to join Meituan.com (his shares in Fanfou.com were transferred to Meituan.com accordingly); in 2012, he was appointed as Vice President of Sales of Meituan.com, building a national ground promotion system.

In the second half of 2014, Yang Jun gradually faded out of Meituan. Subsequently, he founded Skyline Venture Capital. In the following years, he led projects including Camel Finance (a consumer installment financial service platform), Dache Chain (a blockchain ride-hailing application), and Songshu Pinpin (a community group-buying platform). However, all these entrepreneurial projects marked with the imprint of the times have faded out of public discourse and been lost in the tide of history.

But his entrepreneurial pace has not stopped — the journey of AI education is about to start.

According to its official website, his exploration in the education field can be traced back to 2017. At that time, Yang Jun established Beijing Harbour City Technology Co., Ltd. (the predecessor of Qihang New Future), launched R&D work on technologies in the AI + further education planning sector, and explored a scientific and predictable path for further education selection.

From 2023 to 2024, the team developed the Xuanhe AI large model, and incubated the AI companion product "Xuanhe AI". However, Xuanhe AI has not gained much public attention as a whole.

In the second half of 2024, based on the original business, Yang Jun and Li Ze, an associate professor from a 985 university, co-founded Qihang New Future, thus forming the current shareholder structure.

Equity penetration shows that the largest shareholder of Qihang New Future is Beijing Qihang Xintu Technology Co., Ltd. (wholly owned by Yang Jun), holding 31.4163% of the shares; Li Ze, Lai Binqiang and Gan Jiawei hold 28.3475%, 3.9057% and 1.2633% of the shares respectively. In addition, there are other minority shareholders (Zeng Qiang, Chen Min, etc.).

Shareholder information of Qihang New Future, screenshot from Qichacha.

We will briefly review the resumes of Li Ze, Lai Binqiang and Gan Jiawei.

Li Ze is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Rural Planning, School of Architecture, Tianjin University. He received his doctorate from the National University of Singapore and serves as the Dean of the Research Institute of Qihang New Future. It is introduced that he has 3.5 million fans across all online platforms.

Lai Binqiang is Wang Xing's middle school classmate, who graduated from the Department of Computer Science, Tianjin University in 2001. In May 2004, he joined Xiaonei.com and became the third partner of Xiaonei.com. Xiaonei.com was launched in October 2005 and was sold in 2006. After Xiaonei.com was sold, Lai Binqiang started a trip that lasted for more than a year. In May 2008, he, together with Wang Huiwen and Chen Liang (one of the founding team members of Xiaonei.com), founded Taofang.com (a second-hand housing website, which was sold to 58.com at the end of 2010). In 2010, he joined Meituan.com, was in charge of multiple departments, and participated in the development of the Hundred Regiments Campaign and the food delivery business. In August 2017, after leaving Meituan, he founded Xiaodaka, an interest community platform. By 2020, the daily active users of Xiaodaka exceeded 5 million. Now, Xiaodaka has been transformed into a profit-oriented project. In a speech in October 2024, Lai Binqiang admitted frankly that the traditional Internet entrepreneurship model — expanding user scale first, then financing and going public, and finally seeking monetization — is no longer sustainable, which is the logic behind the transformation of Xiaodaka. In recent years, in addition to continuing to operate Xiaodaka, Lai Binqiang has paid more attention to entrepreneurial opportunities in the fields of AI, overseas expansion and financial services.

Gan Jiawei was born in 1969. In 2000, he resigned from his job in a state-owned enterprise and joined Alibaba, becoming Alibaba's 67th employee, and later served as Vice President in charge of sales of Alibaba B2B. After joining Meituan in 2011, Gan Jiawei served as COO, and was a key figure who led Meituan to break through the siege of the "Thousand Regiments Campaign". After leaving Meituan, Gan Jiawei joined GL Ventures in 2017 as an Operations Partner.

What kind of company is Qihang New Future that they all have invested in?

It is introduced that Qihang New Future is a career planning consulting company, focusing on the one-stop further education and development planning consulting needs of people aged 18 to 35. With "AI + famous teacher planning" as the core, its business covers further education planning, postgraduate recommendation planning, postgraduate entrance examination planning, overseas study planning and other fields.

Looking at Yang Jun's entrepreneurial trajectory, from social networking to local life e-commerce, and then to current career planning, at first glance the span is very large, but the underlying logic is consistent — using the latest information technology to help people better obtain information and make more correct decisions.

The further education planning he is doing now is precisely one of the most important decision-making scenarios in everyone's early life. The reason why Yang Jun chose this direction is closely related to a period of confusion he once experienced.

In April this year, he recalled at the main forum of the "Future Education and Career Development Conference":

"I was born in Xiugu Town, Jinxi County, Jiangxi Province in 1984. In 2000, I was admitted to Tsinghua University with the 16th highest score in the province. At that moment, all my family members were proud of me. After all, no one from my high school had ever been admitted to Tsinghua University before.

At that time, I was the one with the best academic performance in my family, so my family let me decide what major to choose. But in fact, I had no idea what major I should choose, what kind of job I would do in the future after choosing that major, and what kind of development I would have.

At that time, living in a small town, I had very limited access to information about university application, no Internet, no professional consulting, and I could only explore the major selection on my own. After entering university, I found that I was not interested in the major I chose (note: Yang Jun studied in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering for his bachelor's degree). I took a leave of absence and spent several years adjusting myself to the right path."

This tortuous experience greatly influenced Yang Jun, making him deeply realize that: "There are certain choices in life that, if made too early without being fully understood, will lead to path deviations that often require enormous time cost, opportunity cost, and even psychological cost to make up for."

Therefore, "starting from the end, 15-year planning" is the concept that this company has always adhered to.

At the end of 2025, Yang Jun emphasized at the "2025 International Online Education Conference": "What makes us different from most peers is that essentially we do not answer the question of 'how to choose a good school' or 'how to increase the admission probability', but where this choice will lead people in five years, ten years or even longer. When many families make decisions today, they actually face a realistic contradiction: the choice is made at the present moment, but its impact often does not truly manifest until many years later.

However, most further education planning consulting services still stay in the logic of 'score-oriented' — what schools you can apply for according to your score, and which majors are popular this year. This information is of course important, but they cannot answer the more fundamental question: what kind of person will the child become if they follow this path? What kind of opportunities and challenges will they face... Further education may be one of the earliest but most far-reaching decisions in many people's lives. It is not just an admission notice, but the starting point of the life path. No matter how much information and data you have, if families cannot see where this starting point leads, decision-making is still like 'crossing the river by feeling the stones'."

At the product level, Qihang New Future has launched AI products such as Dazege AI Smart Application and Postgraduate Recommendation King.

In April this year, Qihang New Future released the new generation AI further education decision-making product "Dazege AI Smart Report 3.0". The picture is from the official website of Qihang New Future.

At the team level, according to its official website, as of the end of 2025, Qihang New Future has more than 500 employees, and has set up branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Jinan, Zhengzhou, London and other places.

Since its operation, Qihang New Future has disclosed that the cumulative number of users it has served has exceeded 100,000.

It is noteworthy that in recent years, more and more players have entered the career planning sector, including K12 education companies, vocational education companies and private education groups.

At the end of 2025, when talking about the development trend of the career planning industry, Yang Jun told the media: "This industry is undergoing a very important transformation: shifting from 'information intermediary' to 'decision empowerment'. The core of early planning services is to solve information asymmetry — I know the data that you don't know, so I give you suggestions. But today, information itself has gradually become transparent, the key to future competition must be who can, on the basis of information, help families establish 'future-oriented decision-making capabilities' earlier and more systematically.

This means that further education planning can no longer be a product of 'cramming for the exam' before the college entrance examination, but should be a process of career and life enlightenment that runs through high school, university and even continues afterwards. Its goal is not simply to 'get admitted to a certain school', but to help children understand the connection between themselves and the outside world at each node, and make decisions that are aligned with their long-term goals."

This article is from the WeChat Official Account"Duozhiwang" (ID: duozhiwang), author: Xu Jingjing, published with authorization by 36Kr.