About us
Two companies, one conviction: build honestly, in industries that are overdue for it.
Our story
HOUJIAYAN International Trading was founded in 2020 by Martin Ma and Ophelia Hou, who had been working with the Chinese-Australian community in Brisbane since 2017. The company was founded to take the friction out of cross-border commerce. After years of working with manufacturers and importers, we saw the same problem in every market: opaque pricing, unreliable lead times, and documentation that fell apart under pressure.
HOUJIAYAN Intelligence was founded on a parallel frustration — that mobile software had drifted toward engagement metrics at the expense of usefulness. We started building AI-native apps the same way we run a trading desk: with a clear thesis, a small surface area, and a refusal to ship anything we wouldn't use ourselves.
Everything we do traces back to the same Inner Mongolia — different industries, the same operating ethics.
Three pillars, one origin
Hohhot — our headquarters
A core cashmere-producing region and one of mainland China's largest data-center clusters. The two industries our companies serve, sitting in the same city.
Ordos — the cashmere source
A renowned source of premium cashmere fibres. Direct relationships with ranches and processors — no middlemen, no certificate drift.
Inner Mongolia green grid
Wind and solar capacity that lets us run AI inference on power cleaner than most European grids. Faster, cheaper, and lower-carbon than the alternatives.
Our mission
Make global commerce boring in the best possible way — predictable, documented, and priced honestly. And put practical AI into people's hands without asking for their data in return.
Milestones
- 2017 Co-founded Queensland Northwest Hometown Association and Queensland Northwest Chamber of Commerce in Brisbane, working with the local Chinese-Australian community.
- 2018—2019 Built the cross-border supplier network, the engineering team, and early AI prototypes that would form the foundation of both companies.
- 2020 HOUJIAYAN International Trading founded in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia.
- 2026 HOUJIAYAN Intelligence founded; unified company site launched; cashmere direct-supply program launched from Ordos; AI compute consolidated on Inner Mongolia's renewable-powered grid.
Where we operate
Headquartered in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia — a core region of the world's cashmere supply and one of mainland China's largest clusters of renewable-powered data centers. Customer-facing operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Direct sourcing and quality teams in China.
How HOUJIAYAN API is built
The HOUJIAYAN API gateway runs on a multi-layer architecture designed for reliability and global low-latency access.
- Edge Cloudflare global Anycast network
WAF, DDoS protection, Argo Smart Routing for 20-40% lower trans-Pacific latency
- Tunnel Cloudflare Tunnel (zero-trust)
Encrypted origin connection — VPS ports are never exposed to the public internet
- Origin Nginx reverse proxy on Alibaba Cloud Lighthouse (2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM)
SSL termination, request logging, sub_filter for brand customization
- Gateway NewAPI (open-source LLM router)
Multi-channel load balancing, fallback, quota tracking, and user management
- Upstream DeepSeek · Qwen · MiniMax · Volcengine Ark · Moonshot Kimi (5 providers, 16 models)
Each provider has independent rate-limit isolation; gateway auto-failover on 429/5xx
Service status
Operational status for HOUJIAYAN API and supporting infrastructure is published on our public status page.
A note on what we are
HOUJIAYAN API is an independent AI model integration platform operated by HOUJIAYAN Intelligence. We are not an authorised reseller, partner, distributor, or affiliate of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Alibaba, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Zhipu, ByteDance, or any other upstream provider. All model trademarks belong to their respective owners. Pricing reflects our integration cost plus a margin to operate the gateway and support our customers.
Try HOUJIAYAN API with 100,000 free credits
Self-serve signup, no credit card. New accounts get 100,000 free credits (about $1 of inference). Use it to prototype, run tests, or ship a small project.