Major tech giants are ramping up their layout in the AI office track, and the head of ByteDance's TRAE has resigned to start his own business.
On October 9, ByteDance's AI office product TRAE officially announced that TraeWork and TraeCode will be merged to form a full-link development platform.
On the same day the news was released, another unannounced piece of news spread in the industry — Shi Yang, the former head of TRAE, had left the company before the National Day holiday.
Unsurprisingly, his next stop is still in the AI office track. His partner is no outsider: Fu Yue, former head of AI Data and Security at ByteDance. Market sources say the new project has completed its first round of financing, with a post-money valuation of around 200 million US dollars.
Shi Yang clearly stated on his LinkedIn that his tenure at ByteDance ended in September 2026, and he launched the new project in the same month, with the status marked as "Stealth Mode". No information about the company name, financing amount or investors has been disclosed. As of press time, neither ByteDance nor Shi Yang has responded to the matter. In fact, the rumor has been circulating in the industry for more than two months.
TRAE, formerly known as MarsCode, was launched in 2024. Since taking over the project, Shi Yang has been leading its iteration. The timing of his departure is very delicate, which comes right after a major AI office integration carried out by ByteDance within this year.
Looking at his resume, Shi Yang is not the type of person who stays in one company for his entire career. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Marketing from Capital University of Economics and Business, and his master's degree in International Management from Oxford Brookes University. After graduation, he first joined Microsoft's US headquarters, working on the SDK for enterprise users of Lync for Business; then he moved to Salesforce, where he was responsible for the back-end of single sign-on and multi-factor authentication; later he joined Facebook, in charge of the iOS client for videos and video ads.
In 2016, he returned to China to start a business focused on enterprise cloud identity management, founded a company named Yufu Technology and served as its CEO. In 2020, the company jointly launched the "Qianfan Yufu" IDaaS platform with Tencent Cloud, and was acquired by Tencent in early 2021. Shi Yang stayed in Tencent after the acquisition, serving as the general manager of the Qianfan Scenario Lab middle platform, and launched Tencent's unified identity system Tencent One ID as the person in charge in 2023. He joined ByteDance in 2024 under the alias Steve, managed open source governance operations, and later took over Doubao MarsCode and TRAE.
Fu Yue, his partner, has a more "top-tier" background. She got her bachelor's degree from Peking University, MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, and Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School. She joined ByteDance in 2018, and has worked in TikTok Trust & Safety as well as overseas e-commerce operations. In May 2022, she left briefly to start a business, and returned to ByteDance in October 2023 to lead the establishment of the Global Data team, in charge of training data supply for ByteDance's Seed series of foundational large models. She left ByteDance in August this year, and her former position was taken over by Wang Yinglei, former head of TikTok Platform Responsibility.
One of them is proficient in product engineering implementation, and the other is experienced in large model training data, security and compliance. It is logically reasonable for the two to team up to develop AI office products.
Right after Shi Yang left, ByteDance has nearly finished arranging its own layout in this track.
On July 30, the entire Feishu product team was merged into the Doubao product team, and Xie Xin, head of Feishu, began to report to Zhao Qi, head of Doubao; on August 24, the TRAE and Coze teams were fully incorporated into the Doubao system; on August 25, "Doubao Work", an independent AI product for office scenarios, was released; on September 15, Liang Rubo, CEO of ByteDance, personally announced that the three core businesses of Doubao, Feishu and Volcano Engine will be integrated, and ByteDance will clearly increase its investment in the enterprise market; on October 9, TraeWork and TraeCode were merged to form the unified development platform we see today.
Such intensive actions are backed by a set of tangible data. In the first half of 2026, Feishu's ARR growth rate was 2.5 times that of the same period last year, more than 90% of new customers purchased Feishu AI value-added products at the same time, and the total number of small and medium-sized enterprise customers increased by 70% year on year. The daily average Token call volume of Doubao's large model exceeded 180 trillion in June, with a year-on-year increase of more than 10 times. Volcano Engine ranks first in China's public cloud MaaS market with a 49.5% market share.
But ByteDance is not operating in a vacuum.
During the same period, in the domestic AI office track of major tech companies, integration actions came one after another. Tencent's WorkBuddy ranked first among similar domestic products with 20.97 million monthly desktop visits in June, which was more than the sum of the second and third place, and recently the QClaw related team was merged into the WorkBuddy system. Alibaba integrated three agent products QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun, uniformly branded as "Qianwen Office", and launched the public beta in August. Baidu is also not idle: its AI office product brand was upgraded, and the official Chinese name of GenFlow was determined as "Kuku AI".
In August, the total number of active users of mainstream domestic AI office products reached 21.15 million. Tencent's WorkBuddy had 11.372 million monthly active users, becoming the first product in the industry to exceed 10 million monthly active users. Alibaba's Qianwen Office saw a 298.2% month-on-month increase. On the other hand, ByteDance's Coze had 4.492 million monthly active users, down 9.0% month on month — among the top five products, it and iFlytek Hearing are the only two that recorded a month-on-month decline.
Up to now, there is no information available about what the new project of Shi Yang and Fu Yue will look like, what scenarios it will target, and when it will be launched. There is also no public data to show how to convert between monthly active users and usage time of the merged TRAE.
Source: Xinghe Business Observation
This article is from "ZAKER Finance", and is republished by 36Kr with authorization.