Tech MVP 2021: Wei Guo, FugeTech

Wei Guo

Founder and CEO
FugeTech
China

Guo founded technology startup company FugeTech in 2009 and continues to roll out innovative products aimed at increasing efficiency and transparency in marketing through technology.

Over the past 11 years he has launched a series of successful products to help brands and agencies better manage marketing investment, servicing many leading advertising agencies and advertisers globally such as Unilever, L’Oreal, Publicis Groupe, and Dentsu Aegis Network.

Among FugeTech’s most prominent products is Bid Agent. Launched in 2014, Bid Agent is an all-in-one SEM (paid search) management tool, which has been adopted by more than 100 brands with an annual managed spending of over $150 million. Then there's Rimix, a programmatic trading desk launched in 2016, which has integrated more than 100 media, data and martech providers, enabling brands and agencies to plug and play best-of-breed solutions.

Other products include UniService, launched in 2018, which is a marketing procurement platform. It digitises cross-department collaboration and supplier management, and claims to help advertisers achieve full transparency in marketing investment. Unilever has utilised UniService to manage its marketing investment since 2018, reducing $15 million of budget in the first year, the tech firm claims.

Most recently, in 2020, as Covid-19 imposed serious challenges to the marketing supply chain, Guo immediately set about developing HKH (好快活), a freelancer marketplace that connects agencies and freelancers directly. HKH has received wide acceptance from the market, connecting 205 agencies with 5401 freelancers, with 4774 completed projects so far worth a total transaction value of $37.9 million.

Tech MVP jury members were particularly impressed by Guo's abilities to achieve significant growth and build a string of successful martech products and services.

Guo describes himself as a hands-on leader, and believes it crucial to give his team a solid and unified understanding of the value of their product. He believes in empowering team members to be part of the growth of the company, rather than leaving his team members to work only the tasks they were given. This, he believes, provides stronger motivation levels and delivers higher quality products. In addition, he is not afraid of owning his mistakes. During the pandemic, he penned a series of articles sharing his biggest learning curves as a startup CEO, in hopes of inspiring collective understanding and lifting spirits during a challenging period.