James Wu
| James Wu | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Centauri AI |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founding Centauri AI |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (B.S., Computer Science) |
James Wu is an American software engineer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Centauri AI, a modern ETL and data science platform designed for banks and investment firms. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch.[1]
Career
Wu holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career as a Database Engineering Intern at FunMobility. He subsequently worked at Minted, where he held roles including Staff Engineer and Principal Engineer, focusing on site reliability engineering (SRE) and e-commerce. He then joined Tubi, where he served as Infrastructure Engineering Team Lead from 2019 to 2023 and briefly as Director of Engineering in 2023.
In 2023, Wu co-founded Centauri AI alongside He Lu. The company builds an AI-powered data processing and analytics platform tailored to the financial services industry, with an initial focus on structured finance and alternative investments. Financial firms commonly rely on Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint files to exchange complex asset details, requiring analysts to spend significant time manually extracting and organizing data. Centauri AI's platform uses artificial intelligence to automate this data wrangling process, reducing hours of work to minutes and enabling users to query historical data more efficiently. The company states that this helps firms evaluate assets faster and win more deals.[2]
According to the company's Y Combinator profile, Centauri AI began a pilot with a brokerage team at a public investment bank shortly after launch. The company has identified a potential market of over 100,000 investment teams requiring complex data analysis for alternative investments, estimating a $5 billion addressable market.[3]
Wu has approximately 14 years of experience in building scalable web applications and infrastructure systems. His technical background spans site reliability engineering, infrastructure management, and Kubernetes-based systems.
References
- ↑ "Centauri AI – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Centauri AI – AI-powered Data Platform for Financial Analysts". 'Centauri AI}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Centauri AI – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.