ByteDance Seed Lead Zhou Chang Reported to Leave and Start Physical AI Venture

On October 26, 2026, reports surfaced that Zhou Chang, the core R&D lead behind Seedance, had been seen leaving ByteDance. A person close to the company responded at the time that Zhou had not left. On the evening of October 30, Z Finance reported that Zhou, described as a core leader of ByteDance's Seed team, had indeed departed to start his own company focused on Physical AI, with backing from a top-tier US dollar fund. No details on the investors, funding amount, or valuation were disclosed. IT Home picked up the story on October 31, adding that Zhou had been one of the Seed team's most broadly scoped technical leaders, reporting to Seed head Wu Yonghui, with responsibilities spanning multimodal interaction, world models, visual generation, and robotics. Public records show Zhou graduated from Fudan University in 2012 with a bachelor's degree in computer science and technology, and earned a PhD in computer software and theory from Peking University in 2017. He then joined Alibaba, where his internal alias was Zhong Huang, and served as technical lead for the Tongyi Qianwen large model, working with his team on a series of language and multimodal models. In August 2024, Zhou joined ByteDance to work on large AI models, and currently leads the visual multimodal generation direction for ByteDance's Doubao large model. As of now, ByteDace has not officially responded to the report, and neither the investor, the funding amount, nor the valuation has been disclosed.