Boyuan Deng · Co-founder and CEO of RankAI

About

Boyuan Deng is co-founder and CEO of RankAI, which helps websites grow.

Boyuan was a founding engineer at Kaon, previously FlowGPT.

Boyuan was a full stack engineer at Herald.

Boyuan was an undergraduate researcher at Berkeley RISE Lab and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research and earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley.

Experience

Education

At a glance

Joined FlowGPT as its first hire
Reported 700K ARR and profitability at RankAI in the interview
Reported 40% month-over-month growth over the preceding four months

Ask Boyuan about

AI agents for website growthOrganic customer acquisitionWebsite experimentation

Story

From China to Berkeley

I was born in China and moved to the U.S. for high school, where I met my co-founder Hugo. I later went to Berkeley to study computer science.

From an SEO agent to a broader platform

After FlowGPT, I built an SEO agent—not an agency. Competing as a narrow software tool pushed me to rethink how much of a website’s growth we should tackle. RankAI gradually became a broader platform, with agents intended to connect the work and run experiments rather than leave people to coordinate separate tools.

Learning growth at FlowGPT

In the interview, I said FlowGPT reached 4 million monthly active users during my time there, before I decided to leave. Seeing the role organic traffic played in its growth helped shape what I wanted to build next.

Finding RankAI’s customers

In the interview, I described three roughly equal sources of customers: our own website as an inbound channel, client referrals, and direct email outreach combined with meeting people at San Francisco events.

Full record · 10 facts, for people and agents who want everything

Work

Boyuan was a founding engineer at Kaon, previously FlowGPT, from February 2023 to July 2024.
Boyuan was a full stack engineer at Herald from February to August 2022.
Boyuan was an undergraduate researcher at Berkeley RISE Lab from September 2021 to June 2022.
Boyuan was an undergraduate researcher at Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research from August 2021 to January 2022.

rankai.ai · 2026-11-12

Boyuan focuses on how content ranks in Google and is cited by AI search tools.
Boyuan works on technical SEO, generative engine optimization and programmatic content strategy.
Boyuan focuses on agent-driven workflows for research, production and iteration.
Boyuan scaled FlowGPT from zero to 4 million users through organic search.

Education

Boyuan earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, from January 2020 to 2023.
Boyuan attended Crean Lutheran High School from January 2016 to 2020.