Edward Zhang is Co-Founder and CTO of Nuance Labs, a Seattle-based AI research lab building the first human foundation model that understands and expresses emotion in real time across speech, facial expression, and body language.

Edward earned his PhD in computer graphics from the University of Washington and went on to serve as a research scientist at Apple, where he met co-founder Fangchang Ma at Apple's Seattle engineering office.

At Apple, Edward and his team encountered the deep challenge of faithfully reconstructing human presence for telepresence, which inspired him to tackle the full problem of understanding and generating human conversation natively in a single model.

Edward co-founded Nuance Labs in 2025 alongside Fangchang Ma and Karren Yang, raising a $10M seed round led by Accel, followed by a $50M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from NVIDIA and Define Ventures.

Nuance Labs has assembled a team of PhD researchers and engineers with a combined total of over $60M raised, positioning itself as a premier AI research lab in Seattle with ambitions to become a foundational layer for AI products worldwide.