Steve Xie, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Lightwheel AI, a world-leading simulation and data infrastructure company building the continuous learning infrastructure for Physical AI and embodied robotics.

Steve holds a B.S. in Physics from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and previously led autonomous driving simulation at NVIDIA, Cruise, and NIO, where he architected large-scale synthetic data pipelines that set new benchmarks for realism and Sim2Real transfer.

Steve believes data is not merely fuel but a form of learning, pioneering the Real2Sim2Real framework that enables robots to learn from humans, practice at scale, and continuously improve through deployment feedback.

Under his leadership, Lightwheel has partnered with NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Figure AI, and Stanford University, and has been featured in Jensen Huang's GTC keynote as a key simulation infrastructure powering robotics use cases.

Lightwheel's human video data ecosystem spans over 25,000 environment nodes and 100,000 task types, delivering more than 1.5 million hours of high-quality human data, with new orders hitting 550 million yuan in Q1 2026.