Summary
York Yang is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dyna Robotics, which builds general-purpose, dual-arm robots powered by a proprietary embodied AI foundation model. He previously co-founded and served as CTO of smart-cart startup Caper AI, which Instacart acquired for $350 million in 2021.
Career
Yang studied Electronic Engineering at Zhejiang University in China, where by his own account he spent his first two years more focused on playing in a band than on academics, before joining the university’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Management Intensive Class at Chu Kochen Honors College in his junior year — an experience he has said sparked his interest in entrepreneurship. He graduated in 2014 and moved to the United States to pursue a Master of Science in Computer Science at UCLA, graduating in 2015 (LinkedIn; Z Potentials).
Rather than take a return offer from an internship at Yahoo — the more conventional path most of his international-student classmates followed into large technology companies — Yang instead teamed up with Lindon Gao and other co-founders after graduating from UCLA. Together they built QueueHop, an anti-theft apparel tag that went through Y Combinator, before pivoting to Caper, an AI-powered smart shopping cart startup, where Yang served as CTO starting in 2016. Speaking to TechCrunch around Caper’s 2019 Series A, Yang explained the company’s approach: instrumenting the cart itself with cameras and sensors, rather than an entire store, to scale computation and deployment faster. Caper’s technology was deployed at grocery chains including Kroger, ShopRite, Aldi, and Sobeys before Instacart acquired the company for $350 million in October 2021 (TechCrunch; Wikipedia).
After the acquisition, Yang stayed on at Instacart for several years, rising to Senior Director of Engineering and later Principal Research Engineer, where he led research across computer vision, visual and multimodal language models, and sensor fusion for Instacart’s Caper-derived smart-cart technology. He left Instacart in 2024 to co-found Dyna Robotics with Gao and former Google DeepMind researcher Jason Ma. As Dyna’s CTO, Yang has emphasized customer-driven engineering — telling PR Newswire ahead of the company’s DYNA-1 model launch that after meeting with hundreds of prospective customers, the single most consistent request was performance, measured by speed and quality, which shaped the model’s design toward commercial-grade throughput rather than experimental benchmarks (LinkedIn; PR Newswire).
Source Notes
This profile draws on York Yang’s LinkedIn profile, a Z Potentials interview covering his personal and professional history, Wikipedia’s entry on Caper AI, TechCrunch’s 2019 coverage of Caper’s Series A, and PR Newswire’s announcement of Dyna Robotics’ DYNA-1 foundation model. Some early biographical details, including his account of his college years, are self-reported in the Z Potentials interview and have not been independently corroborated elsewhere.