Chris Liu is Co-Founder and CTO of DeepReach AI (YC S26), which is building a global network for collecting real-world human data to train physical AI and robotics models.

Chris earned a B.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. in computer vision from USC, then worked as a Research Scientist at Meta on short video recommendation models for Facebook and Instagram. He later became the founding machine learning engineer at Aven, building its ML infrastructure and growth analytics.

Chris's research background in vision-based context sensing, including internships at Microsoft Research Asia and Facebook, shapes his focus on multi-modal and physical AI. At Aven he achieved 10X lower customer acquisition cost than the industry average through modeling and automation.

DeepReach was founded in 2025 with Tim Li and was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch. The San Francisco team of 6 gives local entrepreneurs wearable capture hardware and software to collect data in warehouses, farms and workshops.

At Aven, Chris served as founding MLE and tech lead while the company scaled to number one in direct mail volume in the US. At DeepReach, he is helping address the data bottleneck holding back robots and world models.