Qianyi Deng
Qianyi Deng is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at theUniversity of Oxfordand a co-founder of Piggy Robotics, aY Combinator(YC F25) startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on robotics, machine learning, and applied artificial intelligence, with strong links between academic research and real-world product development.
At Piggy Robotics, she is building mass-producible humanoid robots powered by artificial muscles. The company aims to make robots affordable for everyday home use, at prices similar to consumer electronics. Within two months, the team built a full-size humanoid robot for under $1,000 using their own muscles, valves, and pump systems. This work combines hardware innovation with advanced software and control systems.
Alongside her startup role, Qianyi has strong teaching and research experience. At the University of Oxford, she worked as a Laboratory Demonstrator for nearly three years, teaching software development and database design. Her students included senior professionals from organisations such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, UBS, and NASA. She is also active in leadership roles, including Vice President of the Oxford Women in Computer Science Society and committee work on equality and diversity.
Her research background includes work at Fudan University on transformer models for image editing, and at Tencent, where she improved multilingual OCR and handwriting recognition using large-scale vision models and datasets. Earlier, she worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on data visualisation projects involving large cultural datasets and geographic analysis, contributing to national research publications. At Kuaishou Technology, she supported research linking machine learning with social impact.
Qianyi’s entrepreneurial journey began early. At the age of 13, she founded an outdoor adventure business in China, building the largest laser tag and quad bike centre in her region. She has also been involved in STEM outreach in the UK and volunteered as a teacher in Nepal, teaching mathematics and languages to orphaned children.
Her education includes a DPhil in Computer Science at Oxford, an MSc in Data Science fromUCLwith distinction, and a first-class undergraduate degree in Mathematics with Management and Finance from King’s College London. Her academic interests include multi-sensor systems and 3D human pose estimation.
