Zhou Xian is Co-Founder and CEO of Genesis AI, a global full-stack robotics company on a mission to unlock unlimited physical labor through general-purpose robots powered by physical AI.

Zhou earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2024, advised by Professor Katerina Fragkiadaki, and completed his undergraduate studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In late 2024, Zhou led a landmark 24-month open-source collaboration across 20+ research institutions including CMU, MIT, Stanford, and Tsinghua University to release the Genesis generative physics engine, which became the largest open-source embodied AI project on GitHub.

Prior to founding Genesis AI, Zhou conducted research at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, where he first conceived the vision for combining physics simulation with large-scale AI models to power robot learning at scale.

Genesis AI raised a record-breaking $105M seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Eclipse, with backing from Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, and Bpifrance, and in May 2026 launched GENE-26.5, the first robotics foundation model enabling human-level physical manipulation.