Yijing Shi

Yijing Shi is a business operations and strategy executive with a background spanning technology, corporate venture, management consulting, engineering, and business development. She is Head of Business Operations and Marketing at Kite, having previously served as Head of Business Operations and Chief of Staff at ZettaBlock and held strategy and corporate venture roles at VMware. ^[3]

Education

Shi graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a BS in Materials Engineering and a Master’s in ME from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2015, she earned her PhG in Materials Science, Corrosion, and Electrochemistry from the University of Virginia. ^[2]

Career

Shi began her career as a Research Engineer at Hitachi from 2008 to 2009 in Farmington Hills, Michigan, where she worked on an automation system designed to improve automotive assembly efficiency. In 2014, she joined ExxonMobil as a Summer Research Engineer in the Houston area, where she developed an automated protection system for field pipelines in support of facility integrity and production safety. She then joined McKinsey & Company in 2015 as an Engagement Manager in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on corporate and business-unit strategies, product planning, growth strategies, post-merger integration, and strategy implementation for clients in the automotive, fintech, and high-tech industries.

From 2019 to 2021, Shi worked at VMware in Strategy and Corporate Venture, focusing on strategic and investment-related activities. She subsequently joined ZettaBlock in August 2022 as Head of Business Operations and Chief of Staff, a role she held through October 2024. In November 2024, she joined Kite as Head of Business Operations and Marketing, where she works on business operations and marketing for the company's payments infrastructure focused on the agentic internet. ^[1]

Kite

​Kite AI is developing payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, designed to support agent identity, programmable governance, and stablecoin-based settlement. Its infrastructure uses a framework called SPACE to provide agent authentication, cryptographically enforced transaction constraints, immutable audit trails, and micropayments, while separating user, agent, and session identities through a hierarchical architecture. Kite also uses state channels for low-latency payments and includes mechanisms to revoke compromised agent credentials. The platform is designed to integrate with standards and protocols including x402, Google A2A, Anthropic MCP, OAuth 2.1, and the Agent Payment Protocol, to support transactions and coordination between autonomous agents and external services. ^[4]