Our vision
A patient tutor for every student who wants to learn.
The best teaching, tutoring, and materials gather where the money is, and the gap is widest where resources are thinnest. We’re building Whale Talk to close it: a world students want to learn in, time back for their teachers, and schools that own their data. Then, an explanation and a companion for every lesson.
What we believe
- 01
Habits and curiosity outlast any single lesson.
A student who comes back every day, and wants to know what’s next, will learn far more than any one lesson can teach.
- 02
Teachers are irreplaceable. Paperwork isn’t.
AI should take the reports and the logs, so teachers can spend their hours with students.
- 03
A school’s data belongs to the school.
Records live on the school’s own servers, and every person sees only what their role needs.
- 04
Every curriculum deserves the same care.
Language, curriculum, school roles, and even the game world change from one country to the next. The platform is built to change with them.
Where we’re going
From two schools to anyone who wants to learn.
- AsiaProven at two schools
- United StatesOur home, and our first pilot school in 2027
- EuropeThen
- K-12Primary through high school today
- UndergraduateNext
We started in Asia because our founders know its schools well, and real classrooms let us improve fast. The product itself isn’t tied to any one country.
The team
A small team, building AI-first.
Xinyu Sun
Co-founder & CEO
Lecturer, HKUST Business School
San Diego, CA
Xinyu leads Whale Talk and keeps it close to the classroom: teaching at HKUST’s School of Business and Management shapes what the products ask of teachers and students. Before Whale Talk, Xinyu was a data scientist at Walmart. Xinyu holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and has spent nearly a decade across industry and academia.
Guang Yang
Co-founder & CPO
Former VP, Data, Analytics & AI, Wonder
Short Hills, NJ
Guang leads product for Whale Talk’s teachHub, teacherCoWork and littleWhale while building the AI learning companion for students. Before Whale Talk, Guang spent more than a decade building production AI at Wonder, Jet.com and Walmart, from one of the industry’s first production visual search engines to agentic e-commerce. Guang holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and is an inventor on three US patents.
Lingtao Li
Co-founder & CTO
Former Technical Expert, ByteDance
Beijing, China
Lingtao leads engineering for Whale Talk’s teachHub, teacherCoWork and littleWhale. Before Whale Talk, Lingtao spent eight years at Huawei, Alibaba and ByteDance building systems software and database kernels from the ground up, and was among the first engineers to work on what a database becomes when it is built for AI from the start.
Founding member
Dong Yan
COO, founding member · Silicon Valley, CA
Dong runs Whale Talk’s operations, from company strategy to the conversations with schools and partners. Before Whale Talk, Dong spent more than a decade in data and operations at DoorDash, MasterClass and Houzz, building the experiments and analytics that growth decisions rest on. Dong holds a Master’s in Biostatistics from Harvard.