He Xiaopeng
Chinese entrepreneur; co-founder and chief executive of XPeng Motors.
He Xiaopeng is a Chinese entrepreneur whose career spans mobile internet and electric vehicles. He co-founded UCWeb, a mobile browser company, in 2004 (subsequently sold to Alibaba Group in 2014). He founded XPeng Motors in 2014, initially as an electric vehicle manufacturer, and has subsequently extended the company's scope to include humanoid robotics through the Iron platform.
Role in humanoid robotics
Under He's direction, XPeng has extended vertically from electric vehicle manufacturing into humanoid robotics. The strategic thesis is that the sensor, compute, and manufacturing capabilities XPeng developed for its electric vehicles translate directly to the requirements of humanoid platforms. Iron and Next-Gen Iron reflect this thesis, with the platforms using XPeng-designed Turing AI compute chips (originally developed for the company's electric vehicles) and manufactured with the same production infrastructure XPeng operates for its car lines.
He's positioning of Iron for showroom and retail deployment reflects a strategic assessment that XPeng's existing customer-facing retail presence is a natural early deployment channel for the platform. This differs from the deployment strategies of automotive OEMs that have not integrated humanoid platforms into their retail operations.
Background
He graduated from South China University of Technology. He founded UCWeb in 2004 during the early expansion of mobile internet in China; the company became one of the leading mobile browser providers in Asia and was acquired by Alibaba Group in 2014. He founded XPeng Motors the same year. XPeng became a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 and on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2021.