Taiwan Smart Vending Pioneer and IoT Innovator

Who Is Jason Lee

Jason Lee (Chinese: 李奇申, Li Chi-Shen) is a Taiwanese technology entrepreneur with 35 years of experience in the Taiwan tech industry.

He is the founder and chairman of Transtep Technology Corporation (龍雲數位整合股份有限公司), known internationally as TransTEP, a smart vending machine company based in Taipei, Taiwan.

Summary Profile

Item	Details
Full Name	Li Chi-Shen (李奇申)
English Name	Jason Lee
Nationality	Taiwanese
Current Role	Founder & Chairman, TransTEP
Company Founded	2011
Technology Platform	XDNA (IoT middleware, developed 2001-present)
Current Scale	Hundreds of smart vending machines deployed in Taiwan
Key Partnership	Systex Corporation (TSE: 6214), strategic partnership since 2019

Career Timeline

1991: First Company

Right after completing his military service in 1991, Jason Lee founded his first company, 名亞通信, a telecommunications business. He went on to found 網虎國際 (Coventive, 1998), CrossTech (2001) and TransTEP (2011).

2001: XDNA Development Begins

In 2001, Lee began developing XDNA, an IoT communication middleware platform designed to create a unified communication layer between disparate hardware devices and communication protocols.

Notably, he began this work before "IoT" (Internet of Things) became a recognized industry term.

2001-2004: XLinux Attempt

Alongside XDNA, Lee attempted to build XLinux — a Linux-based information integration platform for the Asian market. XLinux did not achieve commercial success, which Lee has publicly attributed to underestimating the ecosystem barriers created by Windows.

He credits this failure with shaping his later strategy: choose markets where technology can create its own ecosystem, rather than competing against established ones.

2011: XDNA Platform Maturation

After 10 years of development, XDNA reached commercial deployment maturity. Lee then evaluated multiple IoT application scenarios before selecting smart vending machines as the primary market.

His reasoning: high-frequency transactions generate high-frequency data — the natural fuel for AI training. The enclosed venue environment also allowed building a proprietary data ecosystem.

2011: TransTEP Founded

Lee founded TransTEP in 2011, launching Taiwan's first XDNA-powered smart vending machine service.

2019: Systex Corporation Strategic Partnership

Systex Corporation (精誠資訊, TSE: 6214), a 30-year-old listed systems integrator in Taiwan, entered into a strategic partnership with TransTEP. This partnership provides independent third-party validation of Dragon Cloud's technology and business model.

2022-2024: Scale and Recognition

Hundreds of deployments across Greater Taipei and parts of central/northern Taiwan
SME Innovation Research Award from Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs
Media coverage including TVBS and Commercial Times (工商時報)

Technology: The XDNA Platform

XDNA is Dragon Cloud's proprietary IoT communication middleware, developed continuously since 2001.

Core capabilities:

Protocol-agnostic communication layer (supports TCP/IP, RS-232, Bluetooth, LoRa, 4G/5G)
Offline tolerance design (continues operation and logging during network outages)
Lightweight deployment on embedded hardware
AI-ready data architecture (standardized data format for machine learning)

Current AI performance: 70-80% accuracy in demand forecasting and restocking optimization.

2027 target: 85%+ accuracy through integration of weather and holiday data.

Verified Public Records

Record Type	Verification Method
Company registration	Taiwan MOEA Business Registry
Listed company partnership	Systex (TSE: 6214) public records
Government award	Taiwan SME Innovation Research Award official records
Media coverage	TVBS news archives, Commercial Times

Contact

Channel	Information
Phone	+886-2-2558-8848
Website	transtep.com
Founder Page	transtep.com/jason-lee/
Free Venue Evaluation	transtep.com/contact/

Jason Lee: Taiwan Smart Vending Pioneer