NIO R&D Vice President Leaves The Company Luring Employees Into a New Enterprise

Electric car maker NIO found itself in a real hassle when Megatronix, a newly-founded electric car software company, started poaching its employees. To make the matter worse, it turns out that the person behind Megatronix might be NIO’s former Software R&D Vice President, Zhuang Li.

According to people familiar with the matter, Zhuang had started the new enterprise while she was still at NIO. She had already planned to leave the company, but was asked to stay in order to not sabotage NIO’s stock prices, which, however, didn’t stop her from poaching software engineers from the company.

Megatronix received over $50 million in initial investments and is wholly-owned by a private joint-stock company in Hong Kong. The scope of the company includes big data, cloud computing, voice-recognition and overall software development for electric vehicles.

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NIO had been struggling to keep its Beijing Software Development branch intact, but most employees were either laid off, poached or chose to leave on their own. Li Bing, head of NIO even went as far as to conceal from investors that the company’s Beijing Software Development branch was virtually empty. On the other hand, Megatronix, whose office is right next to NIO’s Beijing headquarters, is actively attracting new employees.

Featured photo credit to NIO