Guangdong "Post-00s" Scholar Hong Letong: Entered MIT at 17, Dropped Out of Stanford to Start a Business, AI Company Raised $200 Million in Funding to Join Unicorn Club

The artificial intelligence industry is welcoming a new wave of young entrepreneurs. One of them is Hong Letong, a “post-2000” founder from Guangzhou, China, who established AI company Axiom (axiommath.ai) and completed a $200 million Series A funding round, quickly becoming a focal point in the global tech scene. The round was led by renowned venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, with all existing shareholders participating. After the funding, the company’s valuation reached $1.6 billion, officially entering the unicorn club.

Hong Letong’s academic background is legendary. Born in 2001 in Guangzhou, her parents are ordinary workers, yet she stood out in high school thanks to her exceptional talent in mathematics. In her first year of high school, she was selected for the Guangdong Province Talented Student Program, studying under Professor Wang Xueqin at Sun Yat-sen University. She was one of only four girls to qualify for the Guangdong selection of the National Mathematics Olympiad for Middle School Students. In 2018, at age 17, she was admitted to MIT, majoring in mathematics and physics, and completed her degree in just three years. During this time, she published nine academic papers on number theory, combinatorics, and other fundamental math fields, some of which addressed core problems like automating mathematical proof verification.

At MIT, Hong Letong’s achievements extended beyond academics. She received the prestigious Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize for top female mathematicians in the U.S. and became one of only four Chinese Rhodes Scholars in 2021, studying neuroscience at Oxford University. Her academic pursuits spanned mathematics, physics, neuroscience, and even humanities: after launching a dual Ph.D. program in mathematics and law at Stanford, she ultimately chose to drop out and start her own business. She also received the AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Award for outstanding research by undergraduate mathematicians in North America and was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in December 2025.

Axiom was born from Hong Letong’s deep insight into the pain points of the AI industry. While large models have rapidly advanced in capability, reliability remains an unresolved issue—especially in critical fields like finance and national defense, where probabilistic errors can have serious consequences. To address this, Axiom proposes a “Mathematics as a Service” model, training AI to master rigorous logical reasoning so it can construct and verify proofs like a mathematician. Its flagship product, AxiomProver, has already demonstrated remarkable potential: in December last year, it used the verifiable Lean language to formalize proofs for Eldersham’s problem set, solving Problem 124 in one day and Problem 481 in five hours without human intervention. This is significant—Eldersham’s problem set contains 1,109 challenging questions in combinatorics and number theory, of which only 266 have been proven so far, and only 10 have been converted into machine-verifiable formal versions.

Axiom’s business model targets high-end clients, including hedge funds, quantitative traders, and other financial institutions. The company claims its technology can provide efficient quantitative solutions to complex mathematical proof problems. This focus aligns closely with Hong Letong’s academic background: she previously pointed out the shortcomings of models like ChatGPT in mathematical reasoning during her time at Stanford, emphasizing the current lack of rigorous logical training systems in AI.

Hong Letong is not the only “post-2000” rising star in AI. Recently, another company, Lingchu Intelligent, announced it completed angel and Pre-A funding rounds totaling 2 billion yuan, with investors including national-level capital such as China Development Financial and Guozhong Capital, as well as local funds like Xuhui Capital. Co-founder Chen Yuanpei, also born in 2001, studied at Peking University and Stanford, working under renowned AI scholar Fei-Fei Li. Yang Fengyu, a Yale Ph.D., returned to China in 2024 to found Uliqi, an embodied intelligence company, raising several hundred million yuan in angel funding. Additionally, the AI recruitment platform Mercor, founded by three “post-2000” entrepreneurs, announced a $100 million Series B in 2025, with a valuation of $2 billion.

The rise of these young entrepreneurs marks a new phase in AI driven by Generation Z. Their backgrounds span academia, industry, and capital, with technological approaches covering fundamental research to practical applications, collectively pushing the industry toward greater reliability and efficiency.