Hey, I’m Wesley! 👋🏻

I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Aragon, the world's most popular AI photography studio. We use AI to generate photos of people that are indistinguishable from real photos, eliminating the need for in-person photoshoots.

We have 2M+ users, including Fortune 200 companies and our products have generated 34M+ photos for people. We grew the business to $12M annualized revenue in less than two years with just 8 employees.

We're profitable and raised from Neo (invested in Ramp, Deel, Scale, Vanta, Cursor, Cognition), Sequoia Scout's Fund (invested in Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Notion, Dropbox), and the founders of Vanta ($4B), DocSend (sold for $165M), and Decagon ($1B).

I've been featured in:

I'm also an angel investor/LP in 14+ companies and funds. Here are a select few:

Prior to starting my company, I was a founding engineer at two Y Combinator-backed startups, a software engineer at Microsoft, and an undergraduate AI researcher at the University of Michigan.

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Mountaineering & Triathlons

🏔️ I enjoy climbing mountains. Here are a few notable experiences (click to expand):

Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,341 ft / 5,895 m)

In January 2025, I organized 3 friends to climb the tallest mountain in Africa. It took us 5 days to summit and 2 days to descend. One of us was unable to summit due to altitude sickness which caused debilitating headaches, diarrhea, nausea, and extreme fatigue among us. At that extreme elevation, only ~50% of the oxygen at sea level was available to us.

Early in the climb, I got severe food poisoning. At one point, even water made me have explosive diarrhea. Despite that, I still had to hike through blistering sun, rain, sleet, stinging hail, and snow. Summit day started at 10 p.m., and we ended up hiking 17 hours that day. This was the most physical suffering I've ever endured–even more than my Ironman.

Mt. Whitney (14,505 ft / 4,421 m)

In 2019, I organized three friends to climb the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. We started the climb at 2 am, and it took us 17 hours to summit and descend. People usually split this climb into two days. We ran out of water near the summit, so one of us had to drink piss to survive (we filtered it).

Mt. Fuji (12,389 ft / 3,776 m)

In 2015, I organized 3 friends to "bullet climb" the tallest mountain in Japan, which means to summit and descend in a single push without staying overnight on the mountain. It took us 14 hours total. It’s now forbidden to bullet climb Mt. Fuji because too many people have been injured from attempting it. My friends stopped hiking after this experience because of how challenging it was.

I've wanted to climb the Seven Summits (the highest mountain on each continent, including Mt. Everest) ever since I was a kid. I’ve conquered one so far and have six more to go.

🚴🏻 In 2021, I trained for and completed an Ironman Triathlon–a 140.6-mile (226 km) endurance race consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile marathon, all done back-to-back, in Cozumel, Mexico, where it was 80°F (27°C) with 100% humidity.

Right after I crossed the finish line, I collapsed from hyponatremia and had to be carried away on a stretcher. For the first time in my life, I was scared that I had irreversibly fucked up my body–my entire body was cramping, including my face, and I couldn't even open my fists. The race took me 15 hours to finish and it was the hardest physical thing I've ever done.

💪🏻 I've also trained to do a muscle-up, land a standing backflip, and bench press two plates (225 lbs / 102 kg).

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Fun facts:

• I've moved around a lot growing up. I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oregon, Taiwan, Shanghai, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Nevada.
• I have a cameo in a Netflix documentary called Don't Die.
• I've visited 26 countries and 6 continents.

High school was formative for me:
• When I was 15, I attended a military camp in Kentucky. They shaved our heads as soon as we arrived, none of the bathroom stalls had doors, they made a guy run until he puked because he took too long to finish eating, I ate some ants, we had to wake up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to do physical training (PT), and more. The camp shut down soon after I left due to safety concerns and lawsuits filed against them.
• I was one of the worst League of Legends player in my grade and I wanted to be the best, so I played over a thousand hours on the game and eventually made it to semi-pro on the most competitive server in the world (Chinese server).
• I had a 1.9/4.00 GPA (C- average) during my junior year and I graduated with a <3.00, at the bottom of my class. I believed in my future self to get me to where I wanted to go. (I was right.) Blog Post
• I competed on 6 sports teams–track, cross country, tennis, table tennis, swimming, and basketball.

If you’d like to chat, you can reach me at my first name at my company url. You can also find me on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn, where I'm somewhat active.

Thanks for reading,

Wesley Tian