Jake Loo

Jake Loo is a software engineer who co-founded thirdweb and served as its CTO from September 2021 to February 2026.⁴ Before thirdweb, he was a founding engineer at Bebo during its esports era and a software engineer at Twitch, where he worked on mobile live broadcasting.²⁹ He studied computer science at UC Berkeley, where he interned at Bebo alongside his coursework.¹⁴

Bebo

Loo came to the United States for college and began working a full-time software engineering internship at Bebo while studying at UC Berkeley.¹ His LinkedIn profile lists two stints at the company: March 2015 to August 2016 and August 2016 to June 2019.⁴

During his first period at Bebo, Loo worked on the Bebo Messenger Android app, where he fixed memory leaks, implemented custom UI components, built APK splits to reduce file size, and reduced cold launch load time.⁴ He also prototyped the first browser-based version of Blab, Bebo's ephemeral video product, and built the real-time backend system supporting both REST and WebSocket connections.⁴ On the Blab Android app, he used Kotlin as the primary language with RxJava for flow control and MVVM as the architectural pattern.⁴

After Blab shut down in August 2016, Loo shifted to Bebo's streaming and esports products.⁴ He implemented and optimized the audio and video pipeline for video game streaming software that competed with OBS and XSplit.⁴ He contributed fixes to Chromium for nw.js, implemented native texture support in NaCl (Native Client), and wrote video source and audio filter plugins for GStreamer.⁴ His open-source GStreamer plugin, gst-gamecapture, captured frames from video games on Windows and received active development from May 2018 through May 2019.¹⁵¹⁰

Twitch

When Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo in June 2019 for up to $25 million, Loo was among the roughly ten employees absorbed into the streaming company.⁷⁸ At Twitch, he worked on mobile live broadcasting -- live ingest, audio-video sync, and low-latency playback.² He remained at Twitch from June 2019 to September 2021.⁴

During this period, Loo began exploring blockchain technology in his off-hours.¹ "I found blockchain technology particularly interesting," he told Maddyness UK in 2023. "I started building projects incorporating blockchain technology, adapting the projects depending on our customer feedback, and after a few iterations, we eventually got to thirdweb."¹

Thirdweb

Loo connected with Furqan Rydhan -- former CTO and co-founder of Bebo and founding CTO of AppLovin -- and Steven Bartlett.¹ The three co-founded thirdweb in September 2021, with Loo as CTO.⁴⁵ Loo described the founding problem in the Maddyness interview: "a lot of developers & customers wanted to work with blockchain technology but didn't know how, so we created a platform that met these needs."¹

In December 2021, thirdweb closed a $5 million seed round from Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Christian Angermayer, and Imran Khan and Qiao Wang of DeFi Alliance.⁵¹ In August 2022, the company announced a $24 million Series A at a $160 million valuation led by Haun Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, and Polygon participating, bringing total funding to $29 million.⁶

By August 2022, nine months after public launch, 55,000 developers had used the platform and 150,000 smart contracts had been deployed across six blockchains.⁶ By March 2023, thirdweb had 50,000 monthly active developers, over 200,000 deployed contracts across eight blockchains, and 500,000 monthly blockchain transactions.¹

On GitHub, Loo maintains 139 followers and was an active contributor to thirdweb-dev/contracts, the open-source repository of deployable smart contracts.¹⁴ Between September 2021 and June 2022, he made 594 commits, 118 pull requests, and 82 code reviews, implementing and hardening ERC-721 and ERC-1155 token contracts and permissioned deployment flows.¹⁰

In October 2022, Loo spoke at Web3SF, the Founders, Inc. conference, about thirdweb's growth from zero to 50,000 developers.¹¹ Founders, Inc. is an investor in thirdweb.¹²

Departure

On February 25, 2026, Loo announced on LinkedIn that he had stepped down from thirdweb after more than four years as co-founder and CTO.³ Under his tenure, the engineering team grew to more than 50 people.³

"I got to work alongside some genuinely brilliant people across engineering, product, business, and marketing," he wrote. "Lucky to have learned from every one of them, and especially grateful to have built this alongside Furqan Rydhan an incredible co-founder and partner."³

Loo cited AI as the reason for his departure. At thirdweb, he had overseen the development and deployment of multiple AI agents across the company's products and organization.³¹³ "In early 2025, I only trusted AI with non-critical parts of the codebase," he wrote. "That has changed. Over the last couple of months, I've trusted it to build critical-path systems."³ He described AI as "a practical shift in how software gets built and used, how teams operate, how entire industries reorganize," and said he was going "all in" on AI research and experimentation.³

After leaving thirdweb, Loo relocated from San Francisco to Brooklyn, New York.⁴² His personal website describes him as "a tinkerer with a deep appreciation for the craft of building great products" who believes "strong engineering fundamentals are the path to great product experiences."² He also consults with teams working on AI integration.²

References

1. thirdweb, equipping creators and entrepreneurs with the tools to build Web3 products — Maddyness UK(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
2. Jake Loo — Personal Website(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
3. Jake Loo LinkedIn post — stepping down from thirdweb(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
4. Jake Loo — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
5. Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban back web3 project tool Thirdweb — TechCrunch