WZ
Wei Zhang
Tsinghua University · Grand Prize
Quantum error correction for photonic chips you can actually fabricate.
Now leading the Photonics Compute Lab at Tsinghua. Seed-funded by Sequoia Capital China, 2026.
Seventeen years of ideas told well, in seven minutes or less.
Shanghai grand finale · 12 finalists from 9 countries
Quantum error correction for photonic chips you can actually fabricate.
Now leading the Photonics Compute Lab at Tsinghua. Seed-funded by Sequoia Capital China, 2026.
Carbon-negative cement, made by bacteria that eat what we already exhale.
Spun out CarbonCure SG. First commercial pour at Marina Bay, March 2026.
Sub-second LLM inference on a phone that fits in your pocket.
Open-sourced as pocket-llm. 28k stars on GitHub within three months.
London grand finale · 12 finalists from 11 countries
Diagnosing malaria from a single drop of blood and a smartphone camera.
Deployed across 14 clinics in Lagos by end of 2025.
Folding proteins without folding GPUs into nuclear power plants.
Published in Nature, May 2025. Now at DeepMind.
Self-healing concrete inspired by how bones repair themselves.
Pilot bridge installation in Boston, August 2025.
Boston grand finale · 12 finalists from 8 countries
A battery that recharges itself from the heat your hand gives off.
Now powering medical wearables in three EU pilots.
Teaching neural networks to forget — and why that matters for your privacy.
Forget.ai, $4M seed round, 2024.
Mapping ocean plastic from low Earth orbit, on a CubeSat the size of a shoebox.
First satellite launched January 2025.