YZi Labs Introduces Its First Atlas Scout Cohort to Back Student-Sourced Early-Stage Startups Key Takeaways YZi Labs is introducing the inaugural cohort of the Atlas Scout Program to give exceptional university students hands-on exposure to early-stage investing earlier than the traditional internship, analyst and associate path. Scouts will source deals, conduct initial research and diligence, build conviction and may help support early-stage founders across Web3, AI and biotech, with up to $1 million in indicative allocation to opportunities arising from the Program and access to YZi Labs' 300+ portfolio ecosystem. The first cohort brings together four Scouts from Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley and UCLA, with backgrounds spanning applied mathematics, AI and physical AI, neuroscience and biotech, AI infrastructure and agents, computational biology and neurotechnology. YZi Labs is introducing the inaugural cohort of its Atlas Scout Program, bringing four university students from Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley and UCLA into its early-stage investment work across Web3, AI and biotech. Atlas gives students the autonomy to launch initiatives on their campuses – from building founder communities to exploring investment opportunities. Students source founders, conduct diligence and develop their own investment perspectives alongside the YZi Labs team, with up to $1 million in indicative allocation to opportunities arising from the Program and access to YZi Labs’ 300+ portfolio ecosystem. YZi Labs has a belief that the industry needs to take unconventional young founders seriously earlier, especially before their work fits a standard funding process. The best people to recognize and support them are often their peers: students building beside them in labs, open-source projects, founder groups and technical communities where early ideas are still being shaped. Atlas turns that belief into a working model. For founders, it can mean potential access to capital, mentorship, access to YZi Labs' network and, where relevant, a bridge into EASY Residency or future investment conversations with YZi Labs. For Scouts, it means learning venture by doing the work itself: meeting founders, asking better questions and forming judgment alongside the YZi Labs team. As Ella Zhang, Managing Partner of YZi Labs, said: "As we see founders of tomorrow emerge earlier than ever, the investors backing them need to be there from the start. Students often recognize ambition and potential in one another long before the rest of the world takes notice. With Atlas, we’re putting capital and conviction behind that instinct -- empowering students to champion their peers, take chances on bold ideas, and open doors for founders whose journeys are just beginning.” Meet the first four Atlas Scouts. Xinmeng Zeng, Stanford University Applied Mathematics | AI Web3 and Physical AI Xinmeng has spent the past three years in the Bay Area close to the kinds of founder conversations Atlas was created to reach. At Stanford, she is an Applied Mathematics PhD candidate. Her current research focuses on DeFi and crypto market structure, including how traders behave on blockchain-based trading venues and in perpetual futures markets. Before Stanford, she completed both her bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at ETH Zurich in three years. Her academic work has moved across fields, from random matrix theory and combinatorics to now decentralized finance. Her life has also moved across countries and technical cultures. Xinmeng grew up across China and Switzerland, speaks Chinese, English and French, and brings a cross-border perspective to the way she meets people and builds trust. At Stanford Founders, where she previously served as VP of Finance, she became part of a graduate founder community spanning more than 1,000 builders across Stanford's seven schools. Xinmeng likes the human part of venture: sitting with founders, hearing how they think, connecting people to resources and helping ideas move from conversation into something more concrete. Atlas gives her a structured way to build on work she was already doing in the Bay Area, between research and startups, technical ambition, and commercial reality. As a Scout, Xinmeng is especially drawn to visionary founders with the ambition to shape the future. She looks for ventures grounded in real utility—products that solve meaningful problems, create lasting value, and have the potential to make a positive impact. Peng (Endy) Xu, Yale University PhD Neuroscience | Biotech Neurotechnology and AI Peng begins with a question he has been thinking about for years: “What makes us human, and how far can humanity evolve from here?” That question led him to neuroscience. At Yale, Peng studies how aging and Alzheimer’s disease affect neuromodulatory signaling and cortical network dynamics. His broader scientific interests span consciousness, cognition and the biological basis of human intelligence, and he received a Gruber Science Fellowship upon entering Yale’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. Working on Alzheimer’s disease made that broader question more concrete. If memory and cognition can deteriorate, how much can we do to preserve them, restore them and, eventually, enhance them? That question gradually pushed his interests beyond neuroscience alone and toward the convergence of AI, biotech and engineering, particularly technologies that could change how humans think, stay cognitively healthy and interact with machines. Outside the lab, Peng has increasingly focused on the people building those technologies. He leads Yale Venture Club, founded Neuro X and co-founded ISEA, working closely with researchers and students at the earliest stages of turning scientific ideas into companies. He also built Project RAW, an early founder discovery and support initiative across university and research communities. Through Project RAW, he has helped source and screen projects, run office hours, prepare teams for pitches, connect them with investors and industry partners, and support them through Demo Day and beyond. That experience shaped how he thinks about early-stage investing. For YZi Labs, Peng brings both scientific depth and the instinct to create a founder pathway around it. Atlas gives him a way to connect the work he has already been doing with deeper access to capital, mentorship and the broader YZi Labs network. “I hope to back people who are building for a world that may still be ten or twenty years away,” he says. His goal is to meet technical founders early enough that the relationship can actually matter. As a Scout, Peng is focused on founders at the frontier of biotech, neurotechnology and AI x bio — people building technologies that could redefine human cognition, extend the limits of healthy brain function and ultimately expand what humans are capable of. Hanchen Li, UC Berkeley PhD Computer Science | AI Infrastructure Agents and Payments Hanchen studies AI infrastructure, but the most interesting part of his profile is where his curiosity goes once the technical system starts touching the real world. At UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, where he is a computer science PhD student advised by Ion Stoica and Joseph Gonzalez, he works on agent infrastructure, inference, context engineering, data and evaluation. Before Berkeley, he worked on long-context LLM inference and became the first employee of Tensormesh, the company behind LMCache. Working on LMCache also pulled him outside research. He helped grow the repository from around 300 GitHub stars to 5,000, while getting hands-on experience with user interviews, distribution, hiring and industry partnerships. Over time, Hanchen became interested in a broader class of infrastructure: systems that sit underneath everything else and determine how important resources move. Compute is one of them. As intelligence becomes increasingly tied to access to compute, questions around who controls it, how it is allocated and how efficiently it can be used start to matter far beyond infrastructure itself. Payments caught his attention for a similar reason. If compute governs how intelligence can be produced and distributed, payments govern how value moves between people, companies and markets. That is where Hanchen’s curiosity goes next. Once he understands the technology, he wants to understand the system around it: who pays, who takes risk, where the bottlenecks are, and what has to be true for a new market to work. He sees YZi Labs as a platform with a long-term investment mandate, a broad technical ecosystem and the patience to study categories that do not fit neatly inside one label yet. Hanchen brings more than access to one of the strongest AI research communities in the world. He brings the habit of following an infrastructure question into the financial, operational and behavioral systems around it. As a Scout, Hanchen is looking at agent infrastructure, AI systems, payments, developer infrastructure, consumer AI and founders whose strongest insight may come from connecting AI with another market. Shawn Wang, UCLA Computational Biology | Neurotechnology Biotech and AI Shawn has been thinking about immersive virtual worlds since he was fourteen. That interest first took him into venture. As a college freshman, he saw VC as a way to get exposure to several of the technologies he cared about at once. He interned at a Hong Kong-based fund investing in infrastructure and software, and later at Verge, which focuses on healthtech software globally. He liked talking to founders and learning what they were building, eventually realizing that one day, he wanted to become a builder himself. He moved to a neuroscience lab at UCLA Health, where he worked as a software engineer on research into human memory using electrodes implanted in the brain. Then he left the lab to start his own company World Zero, building AI gaming companions that can join games, hop on calls and play alongside users.If neurotechnology could eventually change how people enter virtual worlds, Shawn sees AI characters as part of what makes those worlds feel inhabited once they are there. Building on his own also changed how he thinks about early-stage founders. As a solo founder, he found that the hardest part was sometimes not the work itself, but having no one around to calibrate the doubts when things went wrong. Working alone can turn uncertainty into an echo chamber. That is why he pays particular attention to young and unconventional founders as an Atlas Scout. Many are already building before they have had the chance to develop the networks, capital or support systems that come with years in industry. Shawn knows that gap firsthand, and through UCLA and younger founder communities, he is close to people building well before they look like conventional founders. As a Scout, Shawn is drawn to neurotechnology, computational biology, consumer AI and founders working where AI, biology and human experience meet. Backing Founders from Day One Amazon began with door desks in a Bellevue garage. Google began as a Stanford research project, with computers in dorm rooms. Facebook started in a Harvard dorm room as a campus directory running on a single server. Before the traction, the funding rounds, and the signals, there is often a small group of people experimenting with something most of the market has yet to notice. For an Atlas Scout, that could be a classmate working on an unexpected idea or a conversation after a lab meeting that stays with them. Scouts have the autonomy to follow that curiosity and decide what to do next. They might bring a student club together around an emerging technology, host a gathering for campus founders, or spend time exploring an investment opportunity they believe in. They shape their own campus initiatives, with YZi Labs providing connections, guidance and support to help bring those plans to life. Through these student-led efforts, Atlas creates more opportunities for young founders to find support while their ideas are still taking shape. A campus conversation can become an introduction to a mentor, a connection to another builder, or the start of an investment discussion with YZi Labs. And the students making those connections develop their own judgment along the way -- about the technologies worth exploring, the people they believe in and how to help them move forward. About YZi Labs YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Our investment philosophy emphasizes impact first—we believe that meaningful returns will naturally follow. We invest in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech. YZi Labs' portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 25 countries across six continents. Some notable portfolios include Trustwallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, Safepal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI, and more. More than 100 of YZi Labs' portfolio companies have gone through our incubation programs. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X. Disclaimer The Atlas Scout Program is designed to provide selected university students with educational exposure to early-stage venture investing, including opportunities to learn about sourcing, research, and diligence alongside the YZi Labs team. Scouts participate in an independent capacity and are not employees, agents, partners, investment advisers, brokers, dealers, placement agents or other representatives of YZi Labs. Scouts do not have authority to bind or represent YZi Labs, make or approve investment decisions, negotiate investment terms, commit or deploy capital on behalf of YZi Labs, or otherwise act on behalf of YZi Labs in connection with any investment. Any opportunity sourced, researched, or discussed through the Program is subject to YZi Labs’ independent evaluation, due diligence, internal approval processes and sole discretion as to whether, and on what terms, to pursue any investment. Any reference to capital allocation is indicative only, and does not constitute committed or pre-allocated capital to any Scout, founder, company, or investment opportunity. The information provided in this article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, endorsement, analysis, or recommendations with respect to any financial instruments, investments, or issuers. Each person should consult their own legal, tax, and financial advisors for current applicability. This article may contain forward-looking statements which are by nature subject to risks and uncertainties. Investment in cryptocurrency and DeFi projects involves substantial risk, including the risk of complete loss.(Historical earnings: For 2026Q2 (period ended 2026-06-30), reported basic EPS of 14.41, diluted EPS of 14.24, and net income of USD 174.771 billion. Consensus expectations: Consensus for 2026Q3 expects EPS of 3 and revenue of USD 127.677 billion.)