Joshua Xu

Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen, an AI video company that generates talking-head and avatar videos for marketing, training, and localization. He spent six years at Snap before deciding the camera itself could be replaced.

Studying Robotics at Carnegie Mellon

Xu earned a bachelor's degree in automation at Tongji University, then a master's in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, according to BTW Media. "I started robotics at Carnegie Mellon and joined Snap back in 2014," he said on the No Priors podcast.

Building Ads and the AI Camera at Snap

At Snap he started in machine learning for ads ranking and recommendation. BTW Media describes him as the first engineer in ads ranking and the creator of Barista, Snap's machine-learning platform. In 2018 he moved to the AI-augmented camera. Watching Snapchat's baby and Disney-style filters, "that was the first time I saw a computer can actually create and generate something," he told No Priors. In a Unite.AI interview he recalled realizing "the computer can create high-quality and realistic videos."

Replacing the Camera at HeyGen

He co-founded HeyGen in November 2020 with Wayne Liang, a fellow Tongji graduate and former ByteDance product designer, according to BTW Media. Its thesis is blunt: "At HeyGen, we believe that the camera is replaceable." The company builds studio-quality videos with AI avatars and voices so teams can skip crews, sets, and reshoots. Xu told Unite.AI the business had been profitable since the second quarter of 2023, so its Series A was mainly about bringing in advisors and investors to help it scale.