Zhu Jiangming

Zhu Jiangming (朱江明) co-founded a company worth RMB 85 billion, then walked away to start one that lost money on every car it sold. When 89 consecutive investors said no, he pledged his personal fortune to cover three years of employee salaries. His vice president had to physically push him onto stages.

We made it this far because of ignorance, and therefore fearlessness.

The paradox of the reluctant founder #

The central contradiction of Jiangming’s career is that he built two companies requiring enormous public performance while possessing almost none of the instincts that make public performance tolerable. He is, by his own description, a social phobe — the kind of person who slips out of industry events early, who refuses to add contacts on WeChat after meetings, who whispers to his VP backstage about whether his hands will shake when he holds up a product in front of cameras.

This is not false modesty. The people who have worked with Jiangming for decades describe the same person: a hardware engineer who would rather spend fourteen hours debugging a circuit board than spend fourteen minutes at a podium. His genius — and it is genuine genius, the kind that produced the first Chinese-developed international technology standard — expresses itself in quiet rooms, not conference halls.

The paradox is that building a car company is the single most public act an entrepreneur can undertake. Cars are tested by journalists, reviewed by millions, recalled by regulators, and protested by owners on the internet. Every failure is photographed. Every success requires a press conference. The industry selects for charisma, for showmanship, for the William Li school of founder performance — the CEO as evangelist, entertainer, and chief storyteller.

Jiangming is none of these things. He built China’s fastest-growing EV company anyway. Understanding how requires understanding where he came from, and what he was willing to sacrifice to get there.

The engineer’s apprenticeship #

The company that made Leapmotor possible was not Leapmotor. It was Dahua Technology (大华技术), co-founded in 1993 when Jiangming and his partner Fu Liquan pooled RMB 5,000 — roughly $600 at the time — and began assembling dispatch communication equipment in Hangzhou. The startup capital would not cover a month’s rent in the city today. It was enough.

Jiangming’s Yiwu merchant roots — the commercial city in Zhejiang province famous for producing traders who are equal parts frugal, stubborn, and resourceful — shaped the company’s DNA from its first day. Waste nothing. Build everything yourself. If you cannot afford to buy a component, learn to make it. The philosophy that would later define Leapmotor’s 65% vertical integration rate was not a strategy document. It was a survival instinct inherited from a trading culture that measures success in margins, not revenue.

The breakthrough came in 2002, when Jiangming led the team that developed the industry’s first 8-channel embedded digital video recorder. The product was a category-creator — the kind of hardware innovation that transforms a small manufacturer into a market leader. Dahua’s rapid ascent from workshop to global surveillance company began with that single engineering achievement.

By 2014, Jiangming had produced something rarer still. His HDCVI video transmission technology was adopted as the first Chinese-developed international standard in the global security industry. The credential was significant not for what it proved about surveillance cameras, but for what it proved about the engineer who built them. He could compete at the highest technical level in the world. He had simply never needed to tell anyone about it.

Dahua grew into the world’s second-largest surveillance company. Jiangming’s net worth climbed into the billions. He had everything a hardware engineer could want: technical challenges, institutional respect, and the freedom to work without being watched. Then he saw a car in Spain.

The epiphany, the bet, and the reckoning #

In March 2015, walking through an upscale neighborhood in Valencia, Jiangming noticed several Renault electric vehicles parked along the street. He had spent twenty-two years building surveillance cameras. What he saw in Valencia was not a car but a pattern he recognized from his own career — the moment when a mature technology reaches the inflection point where it becomes inevitable. Analog to digital in communications. Tape to digital in surveillance. Internal combustion to electric in transportation. Each transition followed the same curve. Each rewarded the engineers who arrived early enough to define the architecture.

On Christmas Eve 2015, Leapmotor Technology Co. Ltd. was incorporated in Hangzhou. Dahua held 33%, Fu Liquan 32%, Jiangming 20%. The shareholder structure encoded an unusual origin: an automotive brand born from the engineering bench of a surveillance technology company.

For six years, Jiangming ran both companies simultaneously. The arrangement revealed something essential about his character: he did not treat Leapmotor as a hobby or a hedge. He treated it as a second apprenticeship. The man who had mastered surveillance hardware was now learning, from scratch, how to build vehicles. He did not know that automakers needed government licenses to operate factories. He thought building cars would cost “a few billion yuan.” The actual figure, he later learned, was closer to twenty billion.

“If I’d known from the start, like Li Bin already knew, that it costs 20 billion yuan to build cars, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

Then the S01 arrived. Leapmotor’s first product — a two-door electric coupe targeting the premium segment — launched in January 2019. It sold roughly 1,000 units against a target of 10,000. Brake failures. Screen blackouts. Steering lockups. A government-mandated recall of one in every thirteen vehicles delivered. Two hundred owners staged a public protest.

The S01 was supposed to prove that a surveillance engineer could build world-class cars. It proved, instead, that he could not — at least not yet. For someone whose entire identity was built on engineering excellence, this was not a business setback. It was a personal verdict. The brakes did not merely fail. They failed publicly, visibly, in a way that forced an intensely private man to answer for his competence in the most exposed forum imaginable.

What followed was worse. Throughout 2020, Jiangming met 89 batches of investors. He was the co-founder of an RMB 85 billion surveillance company. He had produced the first Chinese-developed international technology standard in his industry. He was not a novice seeking seed capital. He was a proven builder asking for a second chance — and 89 times, the answer was no.

The rejections were not polite corporate declines delivered by email. They were face-to-face meetings in which a man who hated face-to-face meetings had to perform confidence he did not feel, defend a thesis the evidence contradicted, and walk out of rooms where people had concluded he was delusional. Eighty-nine times. Company executives discussed abandoning the automotive venture entirely.

The question that every founder eventually faces — “Am I building something that matters, or am I delusional?” — arrived for Jiangming not as a philosophical abstraction but as a practical reality. He had invested approximately RMB 2 billion of personal funds. “Some voluntarily, some involuntarily, because nobody else would invest.” He pledged to cover all employee salaries from his own pocket for three years. The Yiwu merchant instinct — never abandon what you have paid for — held him in place when rational analysis said to leave.

The reckoning at Qiandao Lake #

The turning point was not an act of inspiration. It was an act of intellectual honesty. At a closed-door strategy retreat at Qiandao Lake in April 2020, Jiangming stopped defending the S01 thesis and listened to what the market had been telling him for eighteen months. The premium coupe was wrong. The engineering-first philosophy was right. The error was not in the technology but in the assumption about who would buy it.

The decision that emerged from Qiandao Lake — build cheap, smart, and practical instead of premium and aspirational — required Jiangming to admit publicly, to his own leadership team, that his first instinct had been wrong. For an engineer whose professional identity was built on being right about hardware, this was the hardest admission of his career. It was also the most important.

The T03 launched in May 2020 at RMB 69,800 — a budget electric city car that bore no resemblance to the premium coupe Jiangming had envisioned. It sold 10,300 units in its first six months, more than the S01 had sold across its entire lifetime. The product was not glamorous. It was correct. The Dahua DNA — build practical hardware that works, price it so the market cannot refuse — had found its automotive expression.

In December 2021, Jiangming formally resigned from the Dahua Technology board of directors. After six years of running two companies, he chose one. The separation was symbolic in ways that extended beyond corporate governance. Dahua was the safety net — the proven company, the reliable identity, the place where an introverted engineer could always return. Leaving meant there was nothing to return to. The commitment was total.

The introvert on the cover of Forbes #

The IPO arrived on September 29, 2022. Leapmotor listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising HK$6 billion. The stock crashed 33.5% on its first day of trading, falling from HK$48 to HK$31.90.

Jiangming’s response revealed everything about his temperament. He did not deliver a defiant speech. He did not perform optimism for the cameras. He ordered one Coke per employee. The gesture was perfectly calibrated to the man who made it: the company went public, the capital was secured, and the work would continue. Celebration was proportionate. Panic was pointless.

“We made it this far because of ignorance, and therefore fearlessness.”

The sentence is the most honest thing a founder has said about surviving an industry he did not understand. Ignorance was not a metaphor. Jiangming genuinely did not know what building cars required. The fearlessness was not bravado — it was the absence of information that would have produced fear. Had he known the true cost, the true difficulty, the true probability of failure, he would have stayed at Dahua. The ignorance was the condition that made the company possible. The fearlessness was its consequence, not its cause.

In November 2025, Forbes China put Jiangming on its cover. The photograph showed a man who had spent his entire career avoiding exactly this kind of attention — the public gaze, the performance of success, the expectation of charisma — now occupying the most visible position in Chinese business journalism. The social phobe who whispered about shaking hands backstage was now the face of China’s fastest-growing EV company. Leapmotor delivered 596,555 vehicles that year, more than doubling its previous record. The Stellantis partnership had opened 130 markets. The company that 89 investors had refused to fund was now attracting both European and Chinese state capital.

The transformation was never about becoming comfortable on stage. Jiangming remains the person he has always been — quiet, frugal, allergic to spectacle. What changed was not his personality but his willingness to endure discomfort in service of something he believed was worth building. The VP still has to push him toward the podium. He still orders one Coke when everyone else expects champagne. The person who least wanted public attention built a company that demanded it, and accepted the cost without pretending to enjoy it.

“The person who least likes gambling did the most risky thing.” The observation belongs to Jiangming himself. It captures the central lesson of his career: that the best entrepreneurs are sometimes the most reluctant ones, and that ignorance, combined with engineering discipline and Yiwu stubbornness, can produce outcomes that knowledge and charisma cannot.

Last updated: March 15, 2026