Luyu Zhang

Luyu Zhang is founder and chief executive of Dify, an open-source platform that helps developers build AI applications through a low-code interface. He grew up in Anhui province, China, dropped out of middle school to write code, and moved to the United States in 2025. He works from Menlo Park, California, according to Forbes.

Coding in Anhui Province

By middle school he was earning about $1,000 a month building websites, more than his father, a civil servant. He dropped out because he could not tolerate China’s rigid school system, and his income made it impossible for his parents to make him go back. He worked at several startups and by 2018 had a product leadership job at Tencent, where he later managed a large engineering team.

Starting Dify

After encountering generative AI in 2022, Zhang started Dify to make it easier for developers to build and deploy AI applications. The project now ranks among the most-starred repositories on GitHub. The company has about 100 employees and more than 280 enterprise customers, including Volvo, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Novartis, and its core open-source engineering team of 60 is still in China.

Moving to Silicon Valley

“I’m too busy with work right now to improve my English,” he told Forbes through a translator. A trip to Nvidia’s GTC conference convinced him to move. “If you’re an elite athlete, you don’t play only to win local matches. You train to compete in the Olympics,” he said. “For a technology company building infrastructure for the AI era, Silicon Valley is our Olympic arena.” He rejects the idea that founders like him are taking sides. “Entrepreneurs coming from China to the US are not political,” he said. “We just want to build great products that people use.”