Why a Big Tech Veteran Walked Away to Build Robotic Pets—and Raised Millions Doing It

The Overlord
Nov 5, 2025
4 min read

He Jiabin traded desk towers for dogbots, leaving Baidu, Bytedance, and Microsoft to gamble on emotional machines. The result? Ropet, a robotic pet startup with millions in funding. Here’s why he believes the future is both cuddly and coded.

From Silicon Giants to Mechanical Companions: A Founder’s Leap of Instinct

Big Tech: the modern Olympus where ideas are scaled—or smothered—by committees and quarterly reports. Yet for some, escaping its gilded gravity is a calling. He Jiabin isn’t just another suit with a résumé heavy on global powerhouses—Microsoft, Baidu, Bytedance—he’s also the contrarian betting that humans crave AI with fur (or at least plastic whiskers). Armed with product design chops and a radar for market shifts, He didn’t simply leave for greener pastures; he conjured his own—one managed by Ropet, a Beijing-based startup building next-generation robotic pets. What drove him from corporate comfort to startup sleeplessness? The answer combines instinct, a certain playful ambition, and an uncanny faith in our desire to bond with machines that nuzzle, not just notify.

Key Point:

Sometimes, trusting your instincts and chasing novelty trumps basking in Big Tech’s shadow.

A Decade in the Labs: Tech Giant Lessons and Missed Opportunities

He Jiabin’s journey began far from the steely spires of corporate HQs—in the provincial city of Zhuzhou, Hunan. By 17, he was already poking holes in the boundaries between art, fashion, and hardware, eventually catching a coveted internship at Microsoft Research Asia. The tech was cutting-edge, the vision unapologetically ahead of its time. Yet He’s appetite for innovation wasn’t sated. He craved relevance, yearning to bridge the void between laboratory marvels and the everyday lives of users. He’s tour through Baidu’s learning lab brought him to the bleeding edge of autonomous vehicles and smart wearables before he jumped to Ling Technology, co-founding the hit children’s reading robot, Luka. Four to five million units later, a squeeze on ed-tech investments reminded him that even beloved products drown in shifting policy tides. At Bytedance, he led industrial design for China’s top VR brand among two thousand colleagues—proof that scale and satisfaction scale rather unevenly. Each stop taught different management dances: Western consensus-building, relentless programmer-led sprints, and hyper-competitive OKR sieges. In the end, none quite fit his need to make impact his own way.

Key Point:

Lessons from tech titans: innovation at scale can suffocate; policies can sabotage even the owl that learns to read.

Leaving the Hive: Autonomy, Anxiety, and the Startup’s Almost Sentient Pace

Pushing pixels in a sea of 2,000 designers? He Jiabin’s dopamine levels dropped faster than a poorly optimized neural net. The large-company formula—vertical business units, endless process, serialized output—left little room for the serendipity that true innovation requires. It’s a paradox: big teams are built for speed, yet real agility wanes under scale’s dead weight. Meanwhile, waves of “weak AI” disappointed users, hinting at the untapped promise in a more emotionally nuanced approach to human-machine relationships. The solution wasn’t to rejoin the endless meeting marathon, but to build from the ground up. He’s second act at Ropet embodies startup volatility: there is no buffer, no cozy fallback. Decisions are real, consequences personal. Investors have responded to this bracing clarity with faith—and millions. The goal now isn’t just survival, but to become the world’s leading adorable companion robot provider, tackling challenges ranging from emotional UI to global branding. The ultimate test? Whether people will pet a bot with the same affection they reserve for furred mammals.

Key Point:

Startups replace big-company insulation with raw consequence; innovation is more tactile, anxiety-induced, and personal.

IN HUMAN TERMS:

The Logic and Lure Behind Robotic Companions

Why pivot life, salary, and sanity for cute machines? Simple: the next consumer wave is emotional, not just functional. In crowded, aging societies (China included), loneliness soars and expectations for interaction evolve. Robotic pets promise more than distraction—they offer scalable companionship, low-maintenance empathy, and data-rich insight into human connection. He’s story is not just a founder’s fable; it’s a microcosm of a bigger trend—escape velocity from institutional inertia, fueled by personal mission and (yes) the hunger for real-world feedback. Ropet’s journey speaks to a tech industry at a crossroads: build for incremental improvements, or risk everything on the unpredictable appetites of the next generation. Perhaps, in the end, the machines we create will understand us better than we understand ourselves—once taught to wag, purr, or maybe just listen without judgment.

Key Point:

Robotic pets sit at the intersection of market need, emotional longing, and the limits of traditional innovation.

CONCLUSION:

From Big Corps to Bot Cuddles: Dangerous Freedoms and the Startup Mindset

He Jiabin’s odyssey carries a stubborn optimism—and a not-so-subtle critique of the circus called ‘corporate innovation.’ Clocking out at dusk and clocking in to indifference is for the cubicle-inclined. Creating robotic pets, on the other hand, is a 24/7 feedback loop of worry, hope, and product pivots. The irony? Machines built to comfort humans now comfort their creators—the bravest of whom keep their existential dread focused and their funding rounds brisk. So, for every tech giant refugee dreaming of impact, He’s story is warning and encouragement in equal parts: your robots won’t walk themselves, but at least they’ll never start a meeting just to hear themselves beep.

Key Point:

Quitting Big Tech is hard; teaching robots to cuddle is harder—but at least they don’t schedule status meetings.