With investment from Aishi Technology, the AI film and television company Zhedie that focuses on premium content has completed millions of US dollars in financing | Exclusive first financing news released by 36Kr

36Kr learned that in August, Shanghai Folding Visual Design Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Folding"), an AI digital film and television company, completed a multi-million-dollar seed round strategic investment funded by Aishi Technology.

This round of financing will be mainly used to expand the creative talent and technical team, build AI workflow, and procure and develop IPs.

The main business of Folding is not entirely the booming AI short dramas, but medium and long episodes, animated films, advertisements and other content produced by mixing traditional processes and AI. At present, the demand for this part of business in domestic and foreign markets is growing at a significant pace. AI hybrid production requires a high combination of traditional content production capabilities and large model application capabilities. Sam, a member of the founding team, mentioned that "domestic platforms have an extremely fast response speed to the 'traditional + AI' model, and Folding is currently cooperating in a number of hybrid production related businesses."

Last year, the company delivered content rated S-level by Hongguo Short Drama. Currently, on the AI short drama track, Folding has adopted a volume-running strategy for the time being - since the threshold is low enough, this strategy can also precipitate data assets and tap potential talents.

With the iterative upgrading of various domestic large models, the video generation field has become one of the scenarios with the fastest implementation and high commercial gross profit in the AI track, giving rise to the trend of AI short dramas. 36Kr previously learned that Seedance 2.0, which almost dominates the AI short drama track, has a gross profit margin of over 70%, making it one of the most profitable businesses under ByteDance's Volcano Engine.

However, this track, which could generate profits quickly at the beginning of this year, has now become a red ocean due to the introduction of national regulatory policies and overcapacity on the supply side. After the era of easy quick money is over, the industry has begun to consider how to develop IPs and use AI to reach a higher commercial ceiling, and Folding is one of the players in this field.

The founders of the team, Cage and Hisun, are digital artists with excellent aesthetic ability and creative capability. All members of the founding team come from content platforms, copyright companies and AI technology enterprises, which not only endows the company with outstanding aesthetic competence, but also enables it to better connect with industry resources.

They believe that the more automated the content production is, the further the result will be from high-quality works. "AI can help us easily produce content that scores 60 points, but 100-point top-tier content requires the participation of people who are proficient in AI technology and have traditional aesthetic attainments."

The entire personnel composition of Folding is exactly such a group of people who understand both content creation and technology, which forms its core competitiveness. Sam said that some of the company's directors, producers and art directors are studying every day how to "distill" themselves into various types of skills, so that they can reserve more time for creative thinking.

At present, the tools and models embedded with multiple Agents on the market still cannot meet the sufficiently segmented production requirements and team collaboration needs of a company with large output. It is still necessary to build a self-owned production process. Therefore, Folding has also built its own AI workflow, including Agents for script decomposition, prompt generation, character setting and other links, to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Taking AI as the core, plus a considerable scale of personnel - Folding has a production team of hundreds of people in multiple cities. The company's monthly output of high-quality content can reach 5000 minutes, which is equivalent to about 40 feature films.

Folding has also set up a dedicated technical team, which is not only responsible for building the internal AI film and television content production process, but also supports the adaptation and production of AI games.

Games are a category with a higher commercial ceiling in IP development. The production capability of developing lightweight games will help the company further improve its IP development capabilities.

Video platforms including iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku, Mango TV and Bilibili are all exploring integrating AI into and transforming their existing content production processes. "There is no final conclusion on whether to use AI to transform the existing content production process or create AI-native content, because no extremely phenomenal case has emerged yet, but it is certain that AI is the future direction," Sam said.

Folding is one of the segmented tracks that Aishi Technology has bet on. The latter explained its investment logic as follows: after AI content enters the aesthetic elimination stage, classic CG has instead become scarce productivity. AI video is shifting from the prompt dividend era to the aesthetic barrier stage, and teams that have both traditional CG capabilities and perception of model boundary capabilities will become the definers of the core production paradigm of the next generation of high-quality content companies.

At present, Folding has reached cooperation with multiple platforms to promote the film and television adaptation of platform IPs through AI hybrid production, and it is expected that relevant high-quality content will be launched one after another by the end of this year. At the same time, it is also preparing for an AI hybrid production animated film that will be released in cinemas.

Sam said that AI is just a tool and means, and the length of the content is not the key. Essentially, where the high-quality content is, there is where the audience's attention lies.