Exclusive Investment From Cheetah Mobile: 4-Person Startup Team "MobAI" Launches AI Interactive Platform "Lunaverse Stories" | 36Kr Exclusive
Written by Liu Shiwu
36Kr learned that AI startup "MobAI" has completed a seed round financing of several million yuan, exclusively invested by Chizi City Technology, a listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Currently, the AI interactive narrative app Lunaverse Stories developed by MobAI has entered the invitation-only testing phase.
Those familiar with AI interactive products should not be unfamiliar with MobAI.
A year ago, Vito Zhong, the founder of MobAI, was still working at a leading VC. In his spare time, he and his co-founder jointly developed a product called "Cultivation Simulator". This product is a prompt-driven interactive game. Players need to continuously input a lot of prompts for the dialogue and story to progress. In terms of product form, this "long context, user-led generation" model is not friendly to some players. After playing it multiple times, Vito judged that the experience was too tiring.
Cultivation Simulator
In March 2026, Vito decided to start a full-time business. Along with him are Kaito Wang, the CPO, who was an early core member of a leading domestic AI UGC platform and drove the product's daily active users to exceed one million within three months; and August Zhang, the CTO, who is a doctor in the field of AI from the University of Science and Technology of China and once led the application of NLP models in the education industry at a leading domestic artificial intelligence technology company.
After multiple rounds of discussions and industry research, the team decided to put the Cultivation Simulator on hold and instead start a new project: to develop an AI interactive narrative mobile app called Lunaverse Stories targeting young women aged 18 to 24 in North America.
Lunaverse Stories
In the past, this user group was active on overseas online literature platforms such as Wattpad and Goodnovel and had a strong willingness to pay for character-driven immersive narratives. Different from traditional interactive stories where players can only experience preset plots, in Lunaverse Stories, players can react to the actions of characters in the plot at any time while playing a role, thus getting unique content and emotional value generated for them and experiencing the "dream-like" plots. Every decision, failure, and restart of the player will be transformed into new storylines and recommendation signals.
In terms of product form, Lunaverse Stories uses an interactive game feed as the carrier, and its gameplay inspiration comes from the classic tabletop role-playing mechanism. Players roll dice at key nodes, and the result determines the plot direction. Each choice may lead to a completely different storyline.
Different from traditional interactive games, Lunaverse Stories also incorporates a large number of somatosensory operations and mini-games in scenarios, allowing players to continuously release dopamine with stronger randomness and immersive cultivation experience. In addition, the platform also supports a multiplayer mode. The same story is split into multiple perspectives, each with different information and options, and they converge at key nodes to jointly advance, combining the tension of cooperation and competition.
Lunaverse Stories
On this basis, Lunaverse Stories has built two core AI systems. "Remix Anywhere" allows players to insert their own ideas at any plot node, and the AI generates exclusive side stories in real-time while accumulating an understanding of the player's preferences. "Dream Universe" continuously tracks the player's choices, preferences, and remix records in the background, generates personalized exclusive side stories for each player, and distributes them to other users with similar preferences in the recommendation pool.
In addition to the Lunaverse Stories app for players, MobAI plans to simultaneously launch the Lunaverse IDE for content creators, which supports AI-assisted screenwriting, one-click asset generation, and automated publishing. Creators can transform text content into interactive games without a technical background.
Lunaverse IDE
When referring to this mechanism, Vito said that traditional recommendation sorts existing content libraries to find the greatest common divisor, while what they do is to directly generate content that is closest to a single user's preferences and then recommend it back. "We don't invent new categories but use AI to reinvent old categories and improve the personalized experience."
After clarifying the product concept and strategy, let's look back at this round of financing itself.
The investor in this round, Chizi City Technology, is a leading social entertainment company going global on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It has mature methodological accumulations in overseas localization operations and large-scale growth and is also accelerating the layout of the global AI entertainment ecosystem. Chizi City said that interactive narrative content games already have a mature user base and commercialization path in the European and American markets, and they are also optimistic about the potential shown by the Lunaverse team in the AI interactive narrative track.
Of course, even with the support of industrial resources, a team of four completed the product prototype in just a few months, which also shows the positive role of AI in the traditional content production pipeline. An old category of interactive narrative is being redefined after the intervention of AI.
Vito revealed that the internal testing of Lunaverse Stories will be carried out in July and August, the official launch schedule is in the middle of the second quarter, and the Lunaverse IDE has been in trial operation for external creators. In addition, the team is already in communication with several leading US dollar funds for the next round of financing.
This article was first published on "36Kr Games".