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Raymond Huang
Co-founder and CTO · Respan
AI infrastructure Software engineering
Huang taught himself software engineering while finishing a mechanical engineering degree in three years, then turned down robotics PhD offers to build the gateway and tracing stack behind Respan.
Raymond Huang is co-founder and CTO of Respan, a San Francisco company whose platform routes calls to more than 1,000 AI models and traces, monitors, and evaluates the agents built on them. He met co-founder Andy Li as an engineering student at the University of Illinois.
Three Years to a Mechanical Engineering Degree
Huang studied mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Y Combinator launch post says he graduated with the highest honor in just three years and “self-mastered software engineering within a year.” It adds that he dropped robotics PhD offers from top schools.
The same post says he and Li had worked on “a bunch of very bad ideas together in the past year” before settling on Keywords AI.
Building the Gateway
Respan began as an API that routes LLM calls to the best model, and Huang’s side of the company is the engineering behind it. The company publishes its gateway as open source under the Apache-2.0 license, and its pricing page lists a free plan and a Team plan at $199 a month, billed yearly, on top of the hosted tracing and evaluation product.
