GenAI Creative Community founded by Ren Lifeng, a founding member of Douyin, has completed tens of millions of US dollars in Pre-A round financing. | Exclusive from 36Kr.

Written by Zhou Xinyu

Edited by Su Jianxun

"Intelligent Emergence" has learned that Ren Lifeng (ByteDance alias: Juanjuan), the former product head of Douyin and the former vice president of ByteDance's PICO, has received tens of millions of US dollars in Pre-A round financing for his startup project "Shumei Wanwu".

This round of financing is led by Meituan Longzhu, with Jinqiu Fund as a co-investor, and the existing shareholders Sequoia China and IDG Capital continue to follow the investment. After this round of financing, Shumei Wanwu is valued at approximately 150 million US dollars.

Previously, in February 2024, when Shumei Wanwu was first established, it received financing from Sequoia China and IDG.

At present, many Internet executives are engaged in entrepreneurship in the AI model layer or AI-native applications. Ren Lifeng's choice is a creative e-commerce community based on GenAI technology (Generative AI technology).

According to "Intelligent Emergence", Hitems, the personalized item creative community under Shumei Wanwu, is a cross-border e-commerce platform that integrates the creative generation, production, and sales of creators. The development of GenAI technology has brought greater imagination to the commercialization of creativity.

△ Hitems.

In the creative generation stage, based on GenAI technology, Hitems users can generate corresponding high-fidelity item images by describing their creativity or ideas through keywords, pictures, or even hand-drawn drafts;

In the commodity production stage, with the help of the platform's self-developed commodity-level AI 3D modeling technology and the mature supply chain of the community, the creativity of creators can be efficiently produced;

In the consumption stage, Hitems not only provides transaction services but also establishes a community where users can share, browse, and interact.

As one of the "seven founding members of Douyin", Ren Lifeng has a keen insight into user groups and market demands. After joining ByteDance from Baidu Tieba, he was responsible for the main work of the early cold start of Douyin and led the team to restructure the operation categories, defining the vertical labels of Douyin into more than 300 detailed categories - many people evaluate that this decision has made an important contribution to the rise of Douyin.

△ Ren Lifeng.

Later, Ren Lifeng was transferred to Xigua Video in 2020, and then served as the vice president of the VR business PICO. It can be said that he is one of the few entrepreneurs with management experience in long and short videos, community operations, and hardware products at present.

As the AI industry enters the stage of large-scale commercialization, looking at the scenes and markets with gold mines will become the consensus of entrepreneurs.

It can be seen that the landing of AI has passed the stage of "looking for nails with a hammer". The choice of Hitems is to seek more certain growth based on the mature e-commerce + community business model.

Wang Xinyu, a partner of Meituan Longzhu, said:

"We have been paying attention to the new opportunities brought by the large model. After two years of technological progress and a significant reduction in reasoning costs, innovation and entrepreneurship on the AI application side have become possible. The Longzhu team values that the Shumei Wanwu team has made AI + 3D technology top in the industry and quickly connected the supply chain, providing a creative item community opportunity for the new generation and new crowd."

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