Wesley Tian

I'm Wesley Tian, Co-Founder and CEO of Aragon AI, an AI photo platform that's generated 40M+ photos for 2.3M+ users.

I care about craft, building great businesses, and rapid growth – both professional and personal.

Before Aragon, I did AI research at the University of Michigan, was an ML engineer at Clinc (conversational AI), led Michigan's competitive ML team (e.g. Kaggle), and was a software engineer at a few startups. In 2017, I wrote a paper on paths from AGI to superintelligence.

Since launching in 2023, we've scaled Aragon to over 8-figures in annual run rate (ARR) and profitability, serving enterprise clients on 6-figure annual contracts. Our team includes ex-founders, AI researchers, IMO medalists, and alumni from MIT, Meta, Google, and Brex, where my co-founder was an early engineer and helped build Brex Card and Cash.

Our investors include Neo, Sequoia Scout, the founders of Vanta, Decagon, and others.

Selected press:

  • The Information (2025): Why Early-Stage Founders Are Opting to 'Seed-Strap' Their Startups
  • Indie Hackers (2025): Building one of the first AI headshot products and hitting $900k/mo
  • Business Insider (2023): Why I turned down Y Combinator for Neo

Selected writing:

I'm an angel investor/LP in 15+ companies and VC funds, including Neo, OpenAI, and xAI.

Outside of work, I enjoy mountaineering, skiing, and endurance sports. I've finished a 140.6-mile Ironman triathlon, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and ran a sub-6 minute mile. Mt. Rainier and Everest are on the list.

Fun facts:

  • I was born in Mountain View, CA and grew up in the Bay Area, Oregon, Taiwan, and Shanghai (my dad works in semiconductors.)
  • I'm in a Netflix documentary called Don't Die.
  • I've visited ~30 countries and 6 continents.

Favorites:

  • TV/Film: Hannibal, Mindhunter, Succession, Free Solo, Whiplash
  • Books: Flowers for Algernon, The Rosie Project, Star Builders, The Molecule of More
wesley@aragon.ai