From Huawei's "Genius Youth" to Web3 Controversial Figure: The Financing Rashomon of Li Bojie's Metagent.
Written by: Nicky, Foresight News
On July 6, Li Bojie, a former Huawei "Genius Youth," drew attention for publicly criticizing his interview experience at DeepSeek. However, the bigger storm that emerged was the public dispute between him and his former investor ABCDE Capital over his startup project Metagent.
Li Bojie detailed his interview experience at DeepSeek on social media. According to him, after passing the written test, he was put on hold for nearly half a month and only got an interview arrangement after repeated follow-ups. The interview required two rounds of code tests; during the second round, the interviewer thought what he was talking about was a "research problem," repeatedly asked questions about engineering implementation challenges, and showed a lack of understanding.
During the code session, the interviewer noticed he frequently looked at the left screen, immediately questioned him for plagiarism, and said the interview could not continue unless he proved his innocence. Li Bojie said this accusation made him feel "seriously offended" and decided to end the interview on the spot. Later, he called on the public to spread the matter on open platforms.
Li Bojie won the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2017
According to public information on Baidu Baike, Li Bojie was born in 1992, graduated from the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China, and holds a PhD in Computer Science. During his PhD, he published papers in top conferences such as SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he won the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected into Huawei's first batch of "Genius Youth" program (only 8 people nationwide), joined the 2012 Laboratory with a P20 rating, and served as an assistant scientist to deputy chief expert, participating in Ascend AI chip optimization and large-scale model distributed training work. In July 2023, he left Huawei to found Logenic AI (now Pine AI).
On the day after Li Bojie publicly criticized his interview experience, a post by Du Jun, co-founder of Web3 investment firm ABCDE, shifted public attention to another dimension.
On the afternoon of July 7, Du Jun publicly accused Li Bojie, calling him "the founder with the least contractual spirit I have ever worked with." Li Bojie responded that night, and Du Jun added a clarification in the early morning of the 8th; the two sides debated around the Metagent project.
The core of the dispute lies in post-investment responsibilities. Li Bojie founded the Web3+AI project Metagent in 2024, positioned as a token-driven no-code platform that allows users to create and tokenize AI agents, combining AI Agents with blockchain token economy. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital participated in the investment with a total agreement amount of 1.5 million US dollars, with the first tranche of 500,000 US dollars arriving, and the subsequent 1 million US dollars to be disbursed conditionally.
Du Jun said that the Demo shown by the team in June 2024 was of extremely poor quality, the project's social media only posted more than ten tweets, and the progress was far below expectations. Starting from July 2024, Li Bojie no longer responded to investors' questions, deleted his Telegram account and left the group, and instead had co-founder Zhuang Siyuan take over the communication. Since then, the investors have repeatedly requested complete financial statements but have never received a sufficient response. Du Jun said he can accept project failure, but cannot accept taking money and running away.
Li Bojie later responded that only 500,000 US dollars of the investment funds arrived, but the company's equity was recorded based on the 1.5 million US dollars share. The lack of funds led him and the co-founder to take voluntary salary cuts, and recruitment and R&D were hindered. In October 2024, due to family reasons, he could not leave the mainland, and he believed there were compliance risks in the Web3 project, so he resigned from Metagent and obtained board approval. He said he had been fulfilling his duty of regular disclosure before leaving, and subsequent projects also avoided areas such as Web3 and AI infrastructure in accordance with the agreement.
HarryM, a former researcher at ABCDE, posted that during the communication in October 2024, the team still showed a rough Demo, and what they cared most about was when the remaining 1 million US dollars would arrive, and they also asked whether they could issue a Meme coin. They had been perfunctory about the investors' resources and suggestions for nearly a year.
Ye Su, partner of ArkStream Capital, also publicly stated that Li Bojie had contacted the institution during the financing period. The team initially expressed interest because of the good project background, but during the due diligence phase, they found that Li Bojie intentionally confused invested institutions with funds that only expressed intent, and the contract terms sent were very amateurish. The team's attitude towards the token unlocking plan was inconsistent: sometimes saying "we'll decide later," sometimes changing to "we can set one now." Therefore, the institution decided to give up the investment.
Metagent was selected as a potential project in the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, winning a $2,000 reward; in June 2024, it won an award in the decentralized AGI track of the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.
The last tweet on its social media was on June 15, 2024, and it has not been updated for more than two years so far; the project is actually stagnant.
As Metagent ended without a trace, Li Bojie turned to the new project Pine AI. Founded at the end of 2024, the project's predecessor is Logenic AI, which is a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. After users submit task descriptions, AI agents can complete digital chores such as making calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and applying for refunds. The platform emphasizes privacy protection and has passed compliance certifications.
According to public information on the project's official website, Pine AI currently has over 150,000 users, a negotiation success rate of 93%!, and has saved users a total of over 3 million US dollars. It completed a $25 million Series A financing in December 2025. Li Bojie participated as an advisor in June 2024 and officially became the chief scientist in February 2025. Recently, he resigned because his research interest shifted to foundation models. He clarified that he is not the founder of Pine AI, and his departure is purely due to an adjustment in research interests.