From Huawei's genius youth to a controversial figure in Web3, the financing mystery of Li Bojie’s Metagent.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

On July 6, former Huawei "genius youth" Li Bojie attracted attention for publicly criticizing his DeepSeek interview experience. The larger controversy that ensued, however, was his public dispute with former investment institution ABCDE Capital over his startup project Metagent.

Li Bojie detailed his experience participating in the DeepSeek interview on social media. According to him, after passing the written test, he was left hanging for nearly half a month, and only after repeated urgings did he finally receive an arrangement. The interview required completing two rounds of coding tests, and during the second round, the interviewer believed that what he described fell under "research issues" and repeatedly questioned him about engineering implementation challenges while lacking perception.

During the coding session, the interviewer noticed that he frequently glanced at the left screen and questioned him on the spot about potential plagiarism, stating that the interview could not continue unless he proved his innocence. Li Bojie claimed that this accusation made him feel "seriously offended," and he decided to end the interview on the spot. Subsequently, he called for the matter to be spread on public platforms.

Li Bojie won the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2017

According to publicly available information from Baidu Baike, Li Bojie was born in 1992 and graduated from the Youth Class of the University of Science and Technology of China with a Ph.D. in computer science. During his doctoral studies, he published papers at top conferences such as SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he received the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected for Huawei's first batch of "genius youth" initiatives, joining the 2012 Lab at a P20 level, and served as an assistant scientist to deputy chief expert, participating in Ascend AI chip optimization and large-scale model distributed training work. In July 2023, he left Huawei to found Logenic AI (now Pine AI).

On the day after Li Bojie publicly criticized his interview experience, a post by Du Jun, co-founder of Web3 investment institution ABCDE, shifted the media focus to another dimension.

On the afternoon of July 7, Du Jun publicly accused Li Bojie, calling him "the founder with the least contractual spirit I have ever worked with." That evening, Li Bojie responded, and in the early hours of the 8th, Du Jun added clarification, leading to a debate between the two over the Metagent project.

The core of the dispute lies in post-investment responsibilities. Li Bojie founded the Web3 + AI project Metagent in 2024, positioning it as a token-driven no-code platform that allows users to create and tokenize AI agents, combining AI agents with blockchain token economies. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital invested a total of $1.5 million, with the first installment of $500,000 received and the subsequent $1 million conditional on certain criteria.

Du Jun stated that the demo presented by the team in June 2024 was of extremely poor quality, and the project's social media had only published a dozen tweets, with progress falling far short of expectations. From July 2024 onwards, Li Bojie no longer responded to investor inquiries, canceled his Telegram account, and exited the group, with co-founder Zhuang Siyuan taking over communications. The investors subsequently requested a complete financial report multiple times but received no adequate response. Du Jun stated that he could accept the project’s failure but could not accept the money being taken and running away.

Li Bojie later responded that only $500,000 of the investment had been received, while company equity was recorded at the $1.5 million share level, with insufficient funds leading him and his co-founder to voluntarily reduce their salaries and hampering recruitment. In October 2024, due to family reasons, he could not leave the mainland and believed there were compliance risks in Web3 projects; he resigned from Metagent with board approval. He claimed that he had been fulfilling his disclosure responsibilities on schedule before leaving, and that subsequent projects avoided fields such as Web3 and AI infrastructure as per the agreement.

Former ABCDE researcher HarryM stated that during communications in October 2024, the team still displayed a rough demo but was primarily concerned about when the remaining $1 million would be received, even inquiring about the possibility of issuing a meme coin, demonstrating a dismissive attitude towards the resources and advice provided by investors over the past year.

Ye Su, a partner at ArkStream Capital, also publicly stated that Li Bojie had contacted their organization during the fundraising period; the team initially expressed interest due to the project's background. However, during the due diligence phase, it was discovered that Li Bojie intended to confuse invested institutions with funds that were only expressing interest. Additionally, the contract terms he sent were very amateurish, and the team found his attitude on token unlocking plans inconsistent, sometimes saying "we will decide later," and sometimes changing to "we can set one now." As a result, the organization decided to abandon the investment.

Metagent was selected as a potential project in the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, receiving a $2,000 reward; in June 2024, it won an award in the decentralized AGI track at the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.

The last tweet on its social media was posted on June 15, 2024, and it has not been updated for over two years, effectively putting the project on hold.

As Metagent came to an unresolved end, Li Bojie turned to the new project Pine AI. This project was established at the end of 2024, previously known as Logenic AI, and is a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. After users submit task descriptions, the AI agent can handle digital chores such as making calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and requesting refunds. The platform emphasizes privacy protection and complies with certification standards.

According to publicly available information on the project’s official website, Pine AI currently has over 150,000 users, with a negotiation success rate of 93%, saving users over $3 million in total. It completed a $25 million Series A financing in December 2025. Li Bojie participated as an advisor in June 2024 and officially took on the role of chief scientist in February 2025. Recently, he resigned due to a shift in research interests towards foundational models and clarified that he is not the founder of Pine AI, and his departure was purely a matter of adjusting research interests.