Yang Zhang

CEEAA Young Alumni Achievement Award, 2018

For entrepreneurship and innovation in founding Palmap+, an indoor map service provider and publicly traded company based in Shanghai, China; and for leadership in unifying Chinese alumni and promoting school spirit for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Biography

Yang Zhang graduated from Tsinghua University with a Bachelor of Bioscience degree in 2004 before earning a master’s degree at Paris Tech. Zhang attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he earned a master of science in environmental engineering in 2007. It was during his time at the University of Illinois that visiting representatives from companies such as Paypal and YouTube motivated him to be an entrepreneur. 

When he returned to China in 2012, Zhang founded Palmap Intelligence Co. Ltd., focused on indoor location based services. He is a forerunner in this emerging industry and successfully led his team to build Palmap as the top brand in the indoor positioning industry. By 2016, Palmap had become the largest indoor map data provider in China with more than 20,000 sets of indoor maps. Additionally, Palmap is the leading company in indoor positioning and big data solutions, which holds 68 percent of the market shares.

Zhang also serves as the secretary general of the Shanghai Alumni Association of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a member of Asia America Multi-Technology Association.