36 Krypton Founder Liu Chengcheng Appointed Head of ByteDance AI Hardware Team, Overseeing Doubao Mobile Assistant and Full Line of AI Hardware Business

Gate News reports that on March 25, Liu Chengcheng, founder of 36Kr, is currently the head of ByteDance’s AI hardware team Ocean, reporting directly to Zhu Jun, head of the AI product team Flow. He oversees Doubao Mobile Assistant and ByteDance’s entire AI hardware business. Liu Chengcheng led 36Kr to list on NASDAQ at age 30 in 2019, then secretly founded Jingling Technology, developing domestic operating systems and tablet hardware mainly sold overseas. The company was later acquired by ByteDance, and Liu Chengcheng along with the founding team joined ByteDance. After joining, he facilitated ByteDance’s full acquisition of open-ear headphone brand Oladance (around $50 million), and then led the launch of the first AI hardware Ola Friend. The AI glasses project was internally halted in February this year due to hardware homogeneity. Since then, the Ocean team’s strategic focus has shifted to Doubao Mobile Assistant, a product capable of executing complex tasks across applications at the system level, seen as a true breakthrough in ByteDance’s AI hardware line. The Flow team (including Ocean) holds a priority level within ByteDance equal to that of the TikTok team.