Carl Pei built a fan site for a Chinese phone maker he had no connection to. He was a student in Sweden and the company was thousands of miles away. The people at Meizu noticed, and in 2011 they offered him a job in marketing.
Pei was born in Beijing in 1989. His family moved to the United States and then to Sweden, where he grew up and became a Swedish citizen. In 2008 he enrolled in a Bachelor of Science program at the Stockholm School of Economics. In 2010 he interned at Nokia. A year later he left university and moved to China to work full time in smartphones, because the fan site had shown him where the energy was.
Seed money of US$7 million came from names such as Tony Fadell, Kevin Lin, Steve Huffman and Casey Neistat.
In November 2012 he joined Oppo as its international markets manager, reporting directly to Pete Lau. A year later they started OnePlus together in Shenzhen. The OnePlus One reportedly sold close to a million units in 2014 against a target of 50,000. In 2015 Pei presented the OnePlus 2 in a virtual reality video, billed as the first product launch of its kind. He described the global team as a startup inside a larger firm.
He left OnePlus in October 2020. By January 2021 he had announced Nothing, a London company co-founded with Akis Evangelidis, David Sanmartin Garcia, Steven Gao and Levi Li. Seed money of US$7 million came from names such as Tony Fadell, Kevin Lin, Steve Huffman and Casey Neistat.
The first product, the Ear (1) earbuds, arrived in July 2021 at US$99. The first phone followed in 2022 with Glyph lights on its transparent back. It had software problems at launch, and the update policy drew criticism. In November 2023 an iMessage-style app, Nothing Chats, was pulled from Google Play within a day after security flaws were found. In August 2025 demo images on Phone (3) display units turned out to be licensed stock photos, which Evangelidis called an unfortunate oversight.
What almost nobody expected was the strength of the cheaper models and of India. By 2024 annual revenue had roughly doubled to over US$500 million and more than seven million devices had sold. Tiger Global led a US$200 million Series C in September 2025 at a valuation of US$1.3 billion. By May 2026 lifetime revenue had passed US$2 billion, with about 900 staff.
The first spark was never a company at all. A student made a website because he loved a product, and someone paid him for it. Pei's career has kept returning to that instinct, to the pull of a fan.