Jiayuan Fang

Founder & CEO Afficient Academy

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dr. Jiayuan Fang is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Afficient Academy, a Silicon Valley education-technology company offering AI-driven math, English and standardised-test preparation programmes to K-12 students. The company’s premise is that supplemental education fails not because children cannot learn but because a class moves at one speed while its students do not; Afficient’s patented adaptive platform diagnoses where a student’s foundation is actually weak and then lets them progress at their own pace rather than the cohort’s. What makes Fang unusual as an edtech founder is that he did not come from education at all. He spent twelve years as an electrical engineering professor, then founded Sigrity, Inc. and ran it for eighteen years as a leader in software for high-speed electronic system analysis, selling it to Cadence Design Systems in 2012. He founded Afficient two years later, at the point in a career when most people stop starting things, because as a father of three he had evaluated the available after-school programmes and concluded they were not good enough.

Career Highlights

• Founded Afficient Academy in August 2014 and has served as Chief Executive Officer and board member since.
• Founded Sigrity, Inc. in 1994 and served as its President until 2012, building it into an industry leader in high-speed system analysis software; Cadence Design Systems acquired it in 2012.
• Served as Vice President of Research and Development at Cadence Design Systems from 2012 to 2014 after the acquisition.
• Held electrical engineering faculty appointments for over twelve years, at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1990 to 1998 and the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1999 to 2002.
• Named inventor or co-inventor on seven United States patents.
• Won the IEEE Region 1 Technical Excellence Award in 1998, an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993 and an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1991.
• Received a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, both in 2012, the year Sigrity was acquired.
• Invited to the Vice President’s residence in Washington DC on 9 May 2024 for an AANHPI Heritage Month reception, nominated by Representative Ro Khanna for his innovation and entrepreneurship as Afficient’s founder.
• Built out Afficient Math and Afficient English on a patented AI-driven platform and extended the model into direct school partnerships and flipped-classroom pilots.

Professional Journey

Fang completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 and moved directly into academia. He joined the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1990, rising from Assistant to Associate Professor over eight years, and won early-career recognition that tracked a productive research programme — an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1991, an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, and the IEEE Region 1 Technical Excellence Award in 1998. In 1999 he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz as an Associate Professor, remaining until 2002.

The pivot to industry began before he left the university. In 1994, while still on faculty, he founded Sigrity, Inc. to commercialise software for analysing high-speed electronic systems — signal and power integrity work, the discipline of making sure that a circuit board carrying very fast signals behaves the way its designer intended. It is a field where academic modelling and commercial tooling sit unusually close together, and Fang’s research background was the product’s foundation. He served as President for eighteen years, and the company became an industry leader in its niche. Seven United States patents name him as inventor or co-inventor.

Cadence Design Systems acquired Sigrity in 2012. That year Fang collected both a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur of the Year Award and an Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club. He stayed on at Cadence as Vice President of Research and Development for two years.

In August 2014 he left to found Afficient Academy — a deliberate break rather than an adjacent move. The motivation he gives is personal: as a father of three he had spent years assessing after-school programmes for his own children and had found consistent shortcomings in what was available. The response was to build an education company on the same instinct that had built Sigrity, which is to take a problem people handle by intuition and model it properly. Afficient’s programmes diagnose a student’s actual foundation rather than their grade level, then adapt the sequence and pace to the individual.

Afficient has since extended beyond its direct-to-family offering. The company has partnered with schools to address learning gaps, piloted flipped-classroom formats that use its self-paced platform for instruction and reserve class time for consolidation, and built a franchise network around its programmes. In May 2024, Representative Ro Khanna nominated Fang for an AANHPI Heritage Month reception at the Vice President’s residence in Washington DC, where he was recognised for his innovation and entrepreneurship as Afficient’s founder.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Doctor of Philosophy, Electrical Engineering, 1989