Our Team

Derrick Jiang is a passionate traveler and problem-solver who has always believed that the best products are born from real, lived experiences. Having explored destinations across the globe, Derrick developed a firsthand understanding of the friction and inefficiencies that plague the modern travel experience — from fragmented planning tools to unreliable itinerary validation.

With a background rooted in frontend thinking and a systems-oriented mindset, Derrick approaches complex problems by breaking them down into clean, user-facing solutions that are intuitive and impactful. This philosophy became the foundation of FortripAI — a company built not just on technology, but on a genuine frustration with how broken travel planning still is, and an unrelenting drive to fix it.

Derrick believes the travel industry is one of the last major sectors waiting for a true AI-native transformation, and he's committed to leading that change — one trip at a time.

Shuhao Dong didn't come to travel technology looking for a problem to solve. He came to it because he had always been the person who couldn't let a trip be mediocre.

Growing up in China, travel was never casual. It was an event, something his family planned for months with care and intention. He watched his father map out routes by hand, weighing every option with quiet seriousness, and learned early that a well-planned trip is a form of love. That instinct followed him to Canada, where friends quickly learned that if you were going somewhere, you should ask Shuhao first.

But Shuhao is, at his core, a systems thinker. While others saw trip planning as a creative exercise, he saw it as an engineering problem with real constraints, hidden dependencies, and failure modes that most travelers only discover mid-trip. Why do so many itineraries feel rushed on day three and empty on day five? Why does the “highly recommended” hotel leave you 40 minutes from everything you actually want to do? These weren't mysteries to him. They were solvable.

That conviction brought him to Fortrip.

As Co-Founder and CTO, Shuhao is responsible for the intelligence that powers the platform: the multi-agent systems, the reasoning behind recommendations, the architecture that allows Fortrip to do more than retrieve information and actually help travelers think. His background in machine learning and distributed systems, built through years of graduate research and hands-on engineering, gave him the tools. His lifelong obsession with travel gave him the reason.

He believes most travel technology has optimized for speed at the expense of depth, giving travelers faster access to the same incomplete answers. Fortrip was built on a different belief: that the right AI, designed carefully, can do what a great travel advisor does. It can ask the questions you haven't thought to ask, catch the problems you haven't noticed yet, and help you arrive somewhere not just on time, but genuinely ready.

Shuhao is building the platform he wishes had existed every time someone he cared about came home from a trip and said, quietly, that it hadn't quite gone the way they'd hoped.

He intends to fix that, one itinerary at a time.

Bruce Lan arrived at travel technology from a different but equally personal angle. If Shuhao approached travel as a system to optimize, Bruce approached it as an experience that deserved to feel seamless from end to end.

Over years of traveling across North America and beyond, Bruce began noticing the invisible friction most people had learned to tolerate — endless tabs, disconnected booking flows, recommendations that looked impressive but ignored geography and human energy. Trips that were “good” on paper often felt chaotic in motion. He became increasingly convinced that the problem wasn't a lack of information. It was a lack of structured reasoning.

At his core, Bruce is a product architect with a frontend sensibility. He thinks in user journeys, edge cases, and failure scenarios. Where others see a polished itinerary, he sees sequencing logic, time allocation, transportation constraints, and cognitive load. Travel planning, to him, isn't about assembling highlights — it's about designing a system that holds up under real-world conditions.

That belief aligned naturally with Shuhao's conviction that travel is a solvable engineering problem. Together, they saw an opportunity not just to improve planning tools, but to rethink the foundation entirely. Bruce focuses on translating deep intelligence into intuitive product experiences — ensuring that Fortrip doesn't just think powerfully behind the scenes, but feels effortless in the hands of the traveler.

Because in his view, intelligence only matters if it reduces friction in real life — not just on a screen.