Asian Tech Press (June 28) -- Jiesi Ma, the former head of Xiaomi's VR unit, has joined TikTok owner ByteDance and is in charge of Pico's social business.

ByteDance has also acquired BoParticle, a Chinese virtual social platform PoliQ founded and controlled by Jiesi Ma.

After completing the acquisition, ByteDance has merged more than 50 people from the original PoliQ team into Pico as a whole.

The acquisition is the latest step in the layout of the metaverse of ByteDance, which acquired Chinese VR headset maker for about 9.06 billion yua ($1.36 billion) last August.

Jiesi Ma has changed in May his personal credentials on Chinese workplace social platform Maimai to Head of Pico Social Center at ByteDance.

Sources within ByteDance confirmed the news and said that Jiesi Ma is currently reporting to Pico founder and head Henry Zhou.

Jiesi Ma worked for Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi as senior director of VR/AR division, mainly responsible for product and technical management of VR/AR hardware and software.

In 2019, after the dissolution of Xiaomi's VR team, Jiesi Ma set up his own virtual social company PoliQ at the end of August that year.

(US$1 = 6.6865 yuan)