The Chinese company DeepSeek seemed to have come out of nowhere this week when it upturned markets. Here’s what to know about Liang Wenfeng, the engineer who started it.

The man who founded DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence company that rattled the U.S. stock market, is 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, a former hedge fund manager who said he shifted into tech to close the gap between China and the U.S. in the AI industry.

The millennial math nerd behind DeepSeek launched his own hedge fund before turning to artificial intelligence chips.

The 40-year-old founder of China’s DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capacity to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, kept a low profile as he built up a hedge fund and then refined its quantitative models to branch into artificial intelligence.