Carl Pei

Carl Pei (裴宇) is a Chinese-Swedish entrepreneur born in Beijing in 1989 who grew up in Stockholm after his family moved through the United States and then Sweden. His heritage is Han Chinese, and his early years were shaped by immersion in both Eastern and Western consumer cultures — an experience he credits with giving him an intuitive understanding of what global audiences find exciting about technology. He dropped out of the Stockholm School of Economics in 2011 to pursue a full-time career in the Chinese smartphone industry, having already taught himself to code, built Meizu fan communities online, and begun exporting electronics from China as a teenager.

His career began with a brief stint at Nokia before he joined Meizu and then Oppo, where he worked under Pete Lau as international markets manager. In 2013, at the age of 24, he co-founded OnePlus with Lau in Shenzhen, taking the role of Director of Global. OnePlus became one of the fastest-growing smartphone brands in history, selling close to a million units in its first year — ten times its original sales target — on a philosophy of high performance at competitive prices. Pei spent seven years at OnePlus overseeing design and marketing before departing in October 2020.

After only a week of planned travel, Pei founded Nothing in January 2021, based in London. Nothing's mission is to remove barriers between people and technology and make consumer electronics genuinely exciting again. The company launched its first product, the Ear (1) earbuds, in 2021 and its first smartphone, Phone (1), in 2022. By 2024, Nothing had surpassed $1 billion in lifetime revenue with 150% year-on-year growth, shipping over five million devices globally. In September 2025, a $200 million Series C led by Tiger Global valued Nothing at $1.3 billion. Pei has maintained a community investment programme since the company's earliest days, raising over $16 million from nearly 13,000 retail shareholders who are also brand advocates.

Pei was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2016 and Fortune's 40 Under 40 in 2019. He is widely regarded as one of the most commercially instinctive hardware entrepreneurs of his generation — a founder who understands that product identity, design language, and community are as important as specifications. His next ambition for Nothing is an AI-native operating system designed to be hyper-personalised to individual users, extending across future form factors including smart glasses and connected devices.