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Who we are

A founding team built
around the three hardest
things to outsource.

Engineering. Product. Cross-border legal. We cover all three, as founders — so you don't have to coordinate across six vendors.

PhotonFuture was founded in 2023, with people based across China, Hong Kong, and the United States. We work with companies landing cross-border products — architecture, product shape, and compliance filings, carried by a single team end to end. No generic playbooks, no buzzword scaffolding. What we hand over is code, product judgment, and legal conclusions — plus the tempo that holds them together.

2023
Founded
CN · HK · US
Coverage
2
Partner AI products, live
30+
Years combined R&D
What we do

Four shapes of engagement.
One way of working.

  1. Consulting

    Fits · 0 → 1

    Idea-to-plan translation. Over two to six weeks you walk away with documented architecture, a stack and vendor recommendation, and a roadmap calibrated to your runway — not slides, but documents the next engineer can build from.

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  2. Product & Design

    Fits · 1 → N

    Research, interaction, visual, design systems — one team, one practice. Bilingual UX isn't a translation step before launch; it's how the system is shaped from the first wireframe. Product judgment and visual polish are the same work.

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  3. Engineering

    Fits · BUILD

    Web, mobile, backend, IoT, hardware-software integration, AI. Every engagement has a partner-level engineer hands-on — not just an account director. We ship, and then we keep it running.

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  4. Operations

    Fits · N → LONG

    Most vendors leave the day v1 ships. We treat operations as part of delivery — each launched project has a resident engineer and product manager for at least 12 weeks. Monitoring, compliance, renewals, growth instrumentation — caught by the same team.

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Founders

Three founders.

Ethan
CEO · Co-founder

Ethan

  • · Former Tsinghua University researcher
  • · 10+ years R&D experience
  • · AI systems

Leads engineering strategy and R&D direction. Writes production code most weeks.

Leo
CPO · Co-founder

Leo

  • · Former product designer at ByteDance North America
  • · Former product designer at Huawei
  • · Bilingual UX

Owns product shape and the bilingual design system. Runs the design review room.

Hansen
CLO · Co-founder

Hansen

  • · Doctor of Law (J.S.D.)
  • · Former lawyer at a top Chinese Red Circle firm
  • · Cross-border deal structuring
  • · Tech contracts

Handles cross-border structure, IP, and the paper no founder wants to read.

光子之城

Photon — the smallest unit of light, and the fastest. The distance between an idea and a product should feel like this.