Cao Xudong

Overview

Cao Xudong is the founder and chief executive of Momenta, an AI company that describes itself as a physical AI company and was founded in 2016^[1][2]. Before starting the company he worked as a researcher at Microsoft^[2].

Background and founding

Cao's career began in industrial research rather than in the car industry: he spent time as a researcher at Microsoft before becoming an entrepreneur^[2]. He founded Momenta in 2016 and is its chief executive^[1][2]. At the time of the company's Hong Kong listing he described the founding as ten years in the past, with the mission "Better AI, Better Life"^[1].

What Momenta does

Momenta calls itself a physical AI company^[1]. The term is generally used for AI systems that perceive and act in the physical world rather than only handling text or images; a car that drives itself is one example of such a system. In Cao's telling, Momenta's first decade was spent teaching AI to drive^[1].

The commercial side of that work is mass production. Before the listing, Momenta said its mass-production business had passed one million vehicles, and that nine of the world's ten largest carmakers are its partners^[1]. The company also said it had brought safe driving experience to more than one million users^[1].

The Hong Kong listing

Momenta listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 8 July 2026^[1]. Speaking at the listing, Cao said the company would spend the next ten years extending its driving work to robots^[1]. The remark framed the listing less as an endpoint than as the start of a second phase, with the same underlying technology aimed at a different kind of machine^[1].

The numbers behind the listing

Momenta's revenue grew from 743 million yuan in 2023 to 2.413 billion yuan in 2025, a compound annual growth rate above 80%^[1]. Gross margin — roughly, the share of revenue left after the direct cost of delivering the service — rose from 17.5% to 71.6% over the same period^[1]. Against that growth, the company lost more than 9.2 billion yuan over the three years^[1].

Read together, the figures describe a business expanding quickly while still absorbing heavy losses: revenue roughly tripled between 2023 and 2025, margins widened sharply, and the accumulated loss over the three years exceeded the whole of the 2025 revenue figure^[1].

Why it matters

Cao's public account of the company puts its work in two stages: a decade of teaching AI to drive, followed by a decade of extending that capability to robots^[1]. The scale of the mass-production business — more than a million vehicles and partnerships with most of the largest carmakers — is what he points to as the base for that step^[1]. For the carmakers, the appeal of the partnership model is that driver-assistance and automated driving functions reach production vehicles rather than staying in test fleets^[1].

His position also matters because the founder and the chief executive are the same person: how far Momenta moves from cars toward robots is, in practice, a decision in which his stated view of the next ten years carries weight^[1][2].