A 30-Year R&D Journey from Academia to a Global Tech Leader
Ming-Chieh Lee, Founder of truley.AI, earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1993. Shortly after graduation, he joined Microsoft, beginning a research and development career that would span more than three decades.
Early in his career, Ming-Chieh contributed to the development of Microsoft's first-generation streaming technology. In 2008, he transitioned into the communications software business and later took responsibility for end to end audio/video calling experience within the Microsoft Teams organization. From the ground up, he architected and orchestrated one of the most critical experience of modern team collaboration—enterprise-grade video communication technology.
In 2024, Ming-Chieh joined Taiwan AI Labs as CTO, and in 2025, he officially founded truley.AI, embarking on a new chapter as an AI entrepreneur.
Balancing Vision and Execution: Why He Chose to Build a Startup in the AI Era
When asked about the motivation behind founding truley.AI, Ming-Chieh smiled and shared, "I've had the idea of starting my own company for a very long time." He believes that his working mindset, style, and attitide naturally align with entrepreneurship, and explains his decision from three perspectives.
On a personal level, Ming-Chieh places great emphasis on both big-picture thinking and detailed execution. He strongly values professional expertise and teamwork.
“Building a company means paying attention to both strategy and the smallest details,” Ming-Chieh often said.
“Eyes above the cloud and feet on the ground.”
He also emphasized, “It’s not about doing everything yourself. I want to bring together people who share the same vision and values, and build something meaningful and impactful together.”
From an industry perspective, Ming-Chieh pointed out that AI has fundamentally changed how startups are built. "This wave of AI is truly accelerating many things," he noted. "It allows work to be done in a more flexible and creative way by leveraging AI, without being constrained by traditional ways of execution." In his view, this moment represents a rare opportunity for innovators to better leverage resources and technological trends.
Strengthening Taiwan’s Software Ecosystem Through Entrepreneurship
Having spent many years deeply rooted in the U.S. software industry, Ming-Chieh has long reflected on a recurring question: Why is Taiwan’s software industry relatively weaker? Through entrepreneurship, he hopes to help strengthen Taiwan’s software talent pool and industry ecosystem.
"Taiwan is extremely strong in hardware," Ming-Chieh explained, "but there is still a significant gap in software compared to the U.S. and China. I hope more engineers and developers can work together to build globally competitive products."
Ming-Chieh further explained that at this stage of his career, he values flexibility and autonomy, allowing him to turn ideas into action quickly without being constrained by excessive structures or limitations. Compared to traditional organizations with clearly defined roles and lengthy decision-making processes, entrepreneurship offers greater room for action—enabling him to confront problems directly, experiment and iterate rapidly, and ultimately transform ideas into tangible products and real value.
Why Do Enterprises Struggle to Use AI Effectively? The Origin of Truley Companion
The founding of truley.AI stems from Ming-Chieh’s deep observation of enterprise needs and real-world application scenarios. In his view, the true challenge of AI is not the technology itself, but how enterprises actually use it.
“I often ask myself—if every employee in a company had a smart assistant to help handle daily tasks, what should that assistant really be able to do?”
This question gradually evolved into the core vision of truley.AI: building an AI assistant that seamlessly integrates into daily enterprise workflows and genuinely improves productivity. This vision ultimately led to the creation of Truley Companion.
Currently, Truley Companion focuses on three primary application areas:
• Meeting Companion: Enhances meeting and discussion efficiency by intelligently organizing meeting content into shareable, searchable summary reports, accelerating team collaboration.
• Knowledge Management: Integrates meeting content, enterprise documents, search, and generative AI capabilities to enable smoother knowledge flow.
• Agentic Workflow: Automates repetitive tasks and supports cross-system operations for enterprise teams.
“Our goal at truley.AI is to build AI that employees can truly trust—AI that is reliable, stable, and capable of solving real productivity challenges in daily work.”
Reliability First: Building AI That Enterprises Can Truly Trust
Looking ahead to the future of AI, Ming-Chieh believes the key focus in the short to mid term is reliability and stability. "For AI to be truly adopted in enterprises, it cannot be fully autonomous yet. Human judgment and oversight are still essential," he said. As a result, truley.AI's current priority is to make AI systems more controllable and trustworthy.
“In the short to mid term, our goal is to deliver the most reliable and stable AI applications so customers can confidently adopt them,” Ming-Chieh explained. “In the long term, AI applications will expand significantly and eventually enter a true era of intelligent automation.”
truley.AI’s vision is to become a trusted AI partner for enterprises—an intelligent assistant that understands context, executes reliably, and provides continuous support. At the same time, Ming-Chieh hopes truley.AI will showcase the strength of Taiwan’s software teams and become a preferred brand for enterprises adopting AI.