He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.
In 2012, Li was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems.
During his sabbatical from Princeton in 2001, Kai is the principle founder (other co-founders are Brian Biles and Ben Zhu) of Data Domain Corporation which built the first commercial deduplication storage system, opening up a new billion-dollar market.
[7] In 2010, the Data Domain product line captured 64.2% of the market for purpose-built backup devices worldwide, including mainframes.
Prior to joining Data Domain, he served as an industry consultant to AT&T, Bell Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and NEC.