The Asiabits Podcast

"I did my best. Next, do the same in France." - Jules Thevenon, The Forge Humanoid Robotics A French founder spent 10 years in China, built a humanoid robot, and couldn't raise a cent. His engineers left for Unitree and Agibot. So he closed his Shanghai company and is starting over in France. We sat down with Jules Thevenon in Shanghai to ask why. In this episode: Why 10 years in Ch...

"If I help people in the West to make money in China through financial returns by investing in real China technology — maybe then they will believe it." - Rafael Ratzel, TH Capital For years Rafael Ratzel went home to Europe trying to tell people what China is actually like. Lifelong friends called him brainwashed. So he stopped arguing and raised a $100M USD deep tech fund instead, beca...

"I did a deck eight years ago around why this is the Asian century." - Tak Lo, Komputational Kulture The US looked at AI and saw Armageddon. China looked at AI and said this is great, we should embrace it. Tak Lo bet on that gap eight years before ChatGPT made it obvious. He went from US Army engineer to Booz Allen to London Business School to founding Asia's first AI-focused accele...

"The AI revolution has almost definitionally not begun until we get physical AI." - Nils Pihl, Auki Labs Nils Pihl left Sweden for China to fix one missing piece of the internet, a spatial layer that gives robots, AR glasses, and AI agents a shared sense of where they actually are. His company Auki Labs just closed Sweden's largest retailer as its first big enterprise customer, is p...

"I think I probably had 10k in the bank account. This thing doesn't work, then I'm screwed." - Oliver Masson, Blisstil Oliver built sleep headphones alone for six years, burned through $700,000 of his own and his family's money, and cried in a Shenzhen hotel on his first night in China. Then he set a $10,000 Kickstarter goal and raised over $1,000,000 in 30 days. In this e...

"I don't think that Shenzhen's manufacturing ecosystem will be replaced in the next decade. I don't think it's possible." - Joshua Woodard, The Sparrows Josh grew up on the south side of Chicago, studied mechanical engineering at MIT, completed a Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua, and spent four years at Apple managing iPhone and Mac camera production in Shenzhen. In...

"The speed at which you solve problems on the factory floor is the speed at which your product ships." - Ryan Dunwoody Ryan was 24 when he flew to Shenzhen with a suitcase and a crowdfunding campaign to deliver. No Mandarin. No manufacturing experience. The factory gave him a bunk bed in the workers' dormitory. He took it. Five months later, the first production run shipped. Ten yea...

"I lost everything up there when I was hiking. The monk said: Congratulations." - Denise Wu, rootique Denise started at Ogilvy in Hong Kong, launched Foodpanda as the first employee, scaled a bike-sharing startup to the US in three months, and then quit everything to build a hardware device for hair loss treatment. Alone. No co-founder, no R&D background. She spent 300,000 RMB of her...

"Don't be afraid to pivot." - Laurent Le Pen Laurent moved to Shenzhen in 2007 when nobody knew the city. He watched the iPhone launch live from a Philips Mobile office, built the first million-dollar Kickstarter smartwatch out of Shenzhen, pivoted when Apple entered the market, co-founded an oral care brand that became #1 in Poland, and just launched an AI productivity device in Ja...

"Guess how many companies in the US make actuators for robots? Zero." - Tuo Liu, Robotuo Tuo grew up in Shenzhen, spent a decade in the US designing robotics labs for MIT and Harvard, and moved back to build the largest open-source robotics community connecting global founders with Shenzhen's hardware ecosystem. His maps of 150+ humanoid companies in China went viral. His verdict: t...

"I believe I will do it." - Irving Gao, Sweekar 200 people received Irving's first AI robot. One month later, only 1 was still using it. He crashed, pivoted, took out ¥2,000,000 (~$300,000) in personal loans, and built Sweekar – the world's first physically growing AI pocket pet. CES media called it "breaking news." In this episode: How he gave up a PhD at USTC to tak...

"Look for a really honest team that is iterating fast. A lot of demos are fake." - Francesco Crivelli Francesco (23) grew up between Switzerland and Chile, had 30% school attendance, slept in immigrant housing as a teenager - and ended up at UC Berkeley building robots. In 2 months in China, he visited over 500 robotics companies and now builds a platform to deploy robots in the real wor...

"My dog is so lonely at home. I want to fix that." Jacky is 24. He scraped 1 million social media comments, fed them to ChatGPT, and built a smart remote-control ball for dogs in Shenzhen. Featured at CES 2026 and covered by CNET, PePeHola lets you play with your dog from anywhere in the world. Kickstarter launches February 26. In this episode, we discuss: • AI-powered market research: H...

"It's a rich people sport." Pilates sessions cost $100 each. Monthly memberships run $500. Eric, a designer from Shenzhen, said: "We could do better." He built a smart, foldable Pilates reformer in his apartment. 48 hours after launching on Kickstarter: $400,000 raised. In this episode, we discuss: • The "rich people sport" problem: Why Pilates costs $500/month a...

Sean is from Zibo, China's most famous barbecue city. At just 24, he co-founded Cozytime and built the Lumo, an AI-powered smart grill that brings real charcoal-style barbecue indoors with zero smoke. Supported by InnoX, the accelerator founded by DJI's creator, Sean and his team trained their AI on over 100kg of meat. The Lumo uses infrared technology instead of hot air, giving you that...

Audrey Quan went from college student to founder with investments from Abu Dhabi's royal family. At just 20-something, she built an AI company that impressed some of the wealthiest investors in the Middle East. In this episode, Audrey shares her journey from studying mass communication in China to creating AI digital humans and translation devices that caught the attention of investors in Sau...

"I quit my job in Germany and moved to China without knowing what I wanted to do here. For a lot of people, it's crazy. For me, it makes no sense to stay in Europe." In the premiere episode of The asiabits Podcast, Michael (Co-founder of Asiabits) shares the unfiltered story of why he traded the German countryside for the high-speed chaos of Shanghai and Shenzhen. We dive deep into...