Engineering Tomorrow: The HKU Founders Driving the Future of Tech

Direct Drive Tech endeavours to bring robots into every household and sector and is committed to making robots more efficient, dexterous, and intelligent. The company primarily engages in the sales of robotic actuator modules and robots. It has established three major robot technology platforms: (1) the robotic actuator module technology platform; (2) the wheel-legged robot technology platform; and (3) the modular reconfiguration technology platform.

Dr Xuyang Liu, who earned his PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at HKU in 2019, was appointed Vice President of Direct Drive Tech in 2023 and promoted to President in 2025. He is mainly responsible for the Group's technological R&D and business operations. He has led the development and iterative upgrading of the company's three core technology platforms and overseen key innovations in system architecture, advanced algorithms, and product engineering, laying a solid technical foundation for the Group's next-generation products. In 2026, the company passed its Main Board listing hearing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a milestone that supports its efforts to expand product applications across multiple industries.

More recently, Dr Liu helped Direct Drive Tech secure external funding from sources including Sense Capital, Lenovo Capital, Rockets Capital and Brizan Ventures. In 2025, the company passed its Main Board listing hearing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, further supporting its efforts to expand product applications across multiple industries.

“Direct Drive Tech endeavours to bring robots into every household and sector and is committed to making robots more efficient, dexterous, and intelligent,” says Dr Liu.

Humanoid robotics is entering a different phase. The field no longer needs to prove that a humanoid can walk, pick up objects, open doors, or complete a carefully prepared demo. Today, most humanoid progress is still built from strong but separate pieces: whole-body control, behaviour foundation models, motion generation, VLA policies, world models, mission-level agents, and runtime systems. None of them alone gives humanoids a scalable path to general-purpose capability.

Archon Robotics, founded by Professor Hongyang Li, Assistant Professor, Assistant Director (AI Research and Tech Transfer), School of Computing and Data Science, HKU, call the missing layer whole-body intelligence. It is the pretraining path for humanoids: a way to train models that understand tasks, bodies, contact, sensors, motion, failure, and hardware limits as one connected system.

The goal is not to replace whole-body control, but to make whole-body control part of a larger learning system. Not to put a VLM on top of a humanoid and call it general intelligence, but to build a native humanoid foundation model that can absorb heterogeneous human data, robot data, simulation, failures, and deployment feedback, then turn that experience into executable full-body behaviour.

Archon Robotics’s approach connects task understanding, multimodal learning, motion generation and robot control, using human and robot data, simulation and deployment feedback. The platform combines model training, data infrastructure and physical robot deployment.

“The next foundation model frontier for humanoids is not simply composing more skills. It is learning a body,” says Professor Li.

CYC Technology is shaping the future of electric mobility. It has developed its own motors, battery systems and electronic control units in-house, and paired them with forward-thinking design and manufacturing expertise to produce pioneering brands.

Its flagship electronic motorcycle brand, Bonnell, has achieved strong market validation through keen rider demand and victories in multiple competitive events. The full spectrum of electronic dirt bikes developed under the Bonnell brand, including 775 MX, 805 and 902, set new benchmarks for performance and engineering excellence. CYC also produces the brands Ristretto, CYC Motors and EBM Global.

CYC Technology, founded by Mr Jon Chan, who graduated HKU with a degree in architecture, is now entering the global stage. The project has received support along its journey from funding sources including the HKU Dreamcatchers 100K Fund and the Technology Startup Support Scheme for Universities. It won the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Editors' Choice Award in Bicycling in 2020.

“We build the components first, then the bike – because owning the technology from the ground up is the only way to truly lead the market,” says Mr Jon Chan.