Entrepreneurship,Female Leadership,Technology
Li Yitong, CKGSB MBA Alumna; Founder & CEO, TreLoop (AI-Powered E-commerce Application “Wuyuan”); Serial Entrepreneur
As early as the first half of 2023 when generative AI emerged and permeated a wide range of industries in China, Li Yitong took a leap of faith in the AI industry. She got involved in leading one of the country’s first AI-integrated software products as a co-founder. There she oversaw the implementation of AI features in the product and launched the software to the market. Later that year, Li joined a venture capital that incubates early-stage AI startups, a role that allowed her to study in depth several hundred emerging AI projects.
Drawing on these insights, her team launched TreLoop, a product designed to innovate at the intersection of AI and e-commerce. Although the second-hand market is often seen as mature in China, Li believes AI creates new opportunities by addressing persistent challenges in this sector.
At its core, e-commerce can be understood as the interaction of people, products, and places. Li believes AI offers possibilities across all three. For people, AI enables virtual personas—such as digital hosts, customer service agents, or intelligent chat systems. For products, AI can support smart product management, logistics, and warehousing. As for places, AI has the power to transform both online and offline shopping environments—for instance, through the creation of immersive virtual marketplaces.
Across the e-commerce value chain, AI is particularly valuable in data analysis and market insights by processing vast amounts of information, generating reports, and forecasting trends. Consider a small business aiming to sell handcrafted products abroad—AI can help with price benchmarking, consumer research, and even building lightweight datacrawling tools. While AI may not replace professional designers, it can accelerate design workflows by generating visual elements and creative concepts.
Supply capacity and supply chain strength remain decisive factors for survival on e-commerce platforms. Here, AI-enabled SaaS tools can improve inventory analysis and efficiency across the chain, offering new levers for optimization.
Li thought current AI technologies were not yet mature enough to sustain a standalone AGI-based product with both broad user appeal and a polished experience. Therefore, Li realized that the key was to identify concrete user needs and apply their AI experience. Her research pointed her team to the second-hand marketplace. Young consumers—especially those born after 1995 and 2000—make up over 60% of China’s second-hand market, particularly in firsttier cities. This demographic overlaps strongly with AI’s early users, making it an ideal entry point for large-scale penetration. This is where TreLoop comes in. Rather than building a purely native AI product, Li and her team see AI as an enabling tool.
TreLoop began as a market research project in Li’s MBA strategy class at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. Starting with ideation, Li finalized the concept, named her product, designed the functions and eventually secured users. Since then, by partnering with three leading AI model providers in China, Li and her team explored multimodal AI applications in text, images, and videos in e-commerce and built Treloop into a multi-category, multi-functional platform for young people to share and trade idle items. By leveraging its own vertical models and recommendation algorithms, Treloop provides intelligent services including precision marketing, personalized search, smart dialogue, and decision analysis, which significantly enhances users’ experience and transaction efficiency compared with traditional second-hand e-commerce platforms.
Just like many other AI companies, Treloop evolved fast. It started in March 2024 with a founding team. One month later, it began product planning and development. Another three months later, it launched a beta mini-program on WeChat in July and immediately gained significant traction due to a strong user demand, precise positioning and strong promotion. By September, her Wechat mini-program had already generated several million RMB in transaction volume.
In 2025, I took a further step into AI–industry integration by founding EquatorQ, an AI innovation and services brand. EquatorQ focuses on accelerating the fusion of artificial intelligence with real-world industries, with a strong emphasis on AI + globalization.
We have connected with nearly 1,000 AI innovation companies in China and partnered with leading technology giants. Going forward, EquatorQ will continue to help accelerate AI’s transition from technological breakthroughs to realworld value creation, and shape the next chapter of AI-driven industrial transformation.
Read how women leaders are reshaping China’s digital economy, combining research on AI’s mental-health impact with profiles of seven entrepreneurs advancing semiconductors, healthcare, data centers, and AI marketplaces.
