An AI application company with 300,000 users has been acquired by OPPO | Frontline

Written by Zhou Xinyu and Deng Yongyi

Edited by Su Jianxun

On October 22, 2024, the tech blogger AI Dance mentioned in a post: "A company in Hangzhou that uses LLM to write novels is about to close down." "The final outcome is that several people will be acquired, and several people from the team, including the CEO and CTO, will join a domestic mobile phone manufacturer whose name is mainly composed of letters."

According to "Intelligent Emergence", the AI startup "Waveform Intelligence", which focuses on the content creation vertical field, has recently been acquired by the mobile phone manufacturer OPPO. Relevant sources told "Intelligent Emergence": The acquisition is true, but the company has not been dissolved or shut down, and its product "Froggy Writing" is operating as usual.

In response to the above news, Jiang Yuchen, the founder and CEO of Waveform Intelligence, told "Intelligent Emergence": Thank you for your attention. Currently, there is no more information.

Established in March 2023, Waveform Intelligence was once a star enterprise with "talents, financing, and revenue" in the AI industry.

The founder and CEO Jiang Yuchen graduated from Chu Kochen Honors College, Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree, and pursued a doctoral degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). He once engaged in the training and reasoning of large language models at Microsoft Research Asia. The CTO, Zhou Wangchunshu, also pursued a doctoral degree at ETH and is engaged in artificial intelligence research.

These two core members are also the first and second authors of the paper "RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text" that has attracted much attention in the circle. The new training paradigm ReccurentGPT they proposed can achieve a text generation speed three times faster than GPT-4, and at the same time, it can generate infinitely long text while controlling the reasoning cost.

"RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text".

"Intelligent Emergence" once reported that at the beginning of 2024, Waveform Intelligence also received a Pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. The investment institutions include BlueRun Ventures, West Lake Science and Technology Innovation Investment, and the old shareholder Ofound Angel. Among the investors, there are also Jing Xiandong, the chairman of Ant Financial, and the well-known angel investor Fei Gesheng.

In terms of business layout, Waveform Intelligence not only has its own self-developed large model Weaver in the creative field, but also the ToC AI-assisted creative tool "Froggy Writing".

"Froggy Writing" official website.

Until August 2024, "Froggy Writing" was still regarded as a model of AI applications finding PMF (Product-Market Fit). Jiang Yuchen, the founder & CEO of Waveform Intelligence, mentioned in a public sharing that since its launch (January 29, 2024), Froggy Writing has 300,000 users, and the average daily usage time of paying users has reached 4.7 hours.

However, the impressive user data cannot alleviate the long-term concerns of AI companies about long-term profitability.

Currently, many AI applications at home and abroad are seeking acquisitions. In August 2024, the Silicon Valley star AI enterprise Character.AI, with a valuation of over 1 billion US dollars, was once reported to be seeking mergers and acquisitions by Meta and other major companies due to financing difficulties. Subsequently, the CEO, president, and 30 employees joined Google.

Similarly, star AI companies such as Inflection AI and Adept have sold the technology usage license rights to major companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, and at the same time, the core teams have also joined the major companies.

OPPO's acquisition of Waveform Intelligence is also a realistic epitome of the current AI commercialization dilemma. Currently, cooperating with major companies or being acquired is a way out for startups to preserve their businesses and teams.

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