Yu Fang

CTO,Founder at Sonatus

Palo Alto, California, United States

About Yu Fang

Yu Fang is CTO,Founder at Sonatus. Location: Palo Alto, California, United States.

I've spent 30 years building category-defining products at the intersection of data, infrastructure, and AI — from the industry's first multi-core microprocessors to cloud-to-edge AI software now powering more than 8 million vehicles worldwide. As CTO and co-founder of Sonatus, I define the product strategy and technical vision behind end-to-end AI software systems — and I lead the team to build them. I stay hands-on through the entire lifecycle: inventing the core technology, pitching it to early partners, and making sure it ships and delivers value to customers. Our vehicle data collection, machine learning pipelines, and agentic AI systems — orchestrated across vehicle and cloud — power production vehicles for OEMs globally. This work earned me MotorTrend's SDV Pioneer Award, and Sonatus the Automotive News PACE and CES Innovation Awards. Through the Office of the CTO, I also focus on what comes next: emerging AI technologies, new markets beyond automotive, and the architectural shifts that will define the next generation of intelligent systems — before they become obvious. My approach to innovation is firmly rooted in the customer and the market. I build products the market needs and customers love to use, striking the best trade-offs between business needs — cost, time-to-market — and what technology makes possible. Great products live at that intersection. My background spans chip design, cloud infrastructure, big data analytics, on-device edge AI, and agentic systems, supported by dozens of issued and pending patents. That path runs from designing the industry's first multi-core microprocessors at Sun, through the Brocade and Cisco data center systems that today's AI infrastructure is built on, to edge deep learning at Nauto that made commercial fleets safer. Everything I've built has led me to one conviction: intelligence in the physical world — vehicles, factories, and beyond — will run on scalable, data-centric architectures that learn, act, and improve autonomously long after the product ships. That's what I'm building.

Skills

  • Software Development
  • Cloud Computing
  • System Architecture

Additional experience

  • Head of Mobile Engineering

    NAUTO

    May 2016 – August 2018

Education

  • MBA, University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
  • MS, University of Rochester