Aolü AI Emotional Engine, building an all-age companion ecosystem
Against the transformation of social structure, the domestic demand for emotional companionship is continuously releasing. According to public data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of young people living alone in China exceeds 92 million, and the empty-nest elderly population is about 120 million. The two groups generally face the problem of lack of companionship: young people lack a low-pressure outlet to pour out their feelings and expect in-depth emotional interaction; the elderly groups have limited companionship from their children, and have care needs such as daily chatting and health reminders. At the same time, the AI emotional companionship track is experiencing rapid growth — according to data from the China Research and Consulting Center for Industry, the market size of China's AI emotional companionship sector reached 3.866 billion yuan in 2025, and is expected to exceed 59.5 billion yuan in 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 148.74%.
However, there are obvious shortcomings in market supply. Most of the existing emotional AI products only serve a single group of people, and the interaction of general large models is relatively mechanized, lacking long-term memory and emotion perception capabilities, making it difficult to adapt to the completely different expression habits of the two generations. Most products directly call third-party large models, and there is a scarcity of domestically available commercial emotional companion engines that support deep customization. As a result, a large number of smart dolls and companion hardware on the market can only iterate on their appearance, with convergent underlying capabilities, and the 3-month user churn rate generally exceeds 60%. No AI companion hardware with sales exceeding 2 million units has ever emerged in the industry so far.
Self-developed emotional engine to build technical barriers from the ground up
It is precisely by identifying this market gap that Aolü AI was officially launched in March 2026. The project takes the ancient Chinese classic *Classic of Mountains and Seas* IP as the narrative carrier, and relies on the self-developed emotional AI core to cover the two major markets of emotional companionship for Generation Z youth and warm care for empty-nest elderly at the same time.
Different from the existing AI trendy toys on the market that take "hardware as the core and AI as the supplement", Aolü AI adheres to the full-stack self-research route. At present, the emotional engine has been fully developed, and related products have passed the filing of three national authorities including the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security; the APP for youth groups has been fully developed and is ready for launch; the prototype of the electronic badge smart wearable hardware equipped with ESP32 chip has also been completed.
The technical differences are concentrated in four aspects: First, it realizes in-depth semantic understanding, accurately captures the subtext and emotional fluctuations in the dialogue, and outputs empathetic responses instead of simple text matching. Second, it develops self-owned lossless long-term memory technology, establishes independent user files, continues the dialogue context across sessions, and creates a consistent companionship experience. Third, it builds an intergenerational layered content library, integrates national style and popular context for young people, focuses on daily chatting for the elderly, and adapts to the expression habits of different age groups. Fourth, it realizes full-duplex voice interaction, supports active interruption and real-time interjection, and the interaction rhythm is closer to real human conversation. In terms of privacy, the APP supports local data storage, and user dialogue data will not be uploaded to the cloud, which fully complies with domestic data security regulatory requirements.
The product adopts the expansion path of "lightweight first, then heavyweight, with technology reuse". In the early stage, it takes Generation Z as the breakthrough point, and completes cold start relying on lightweight national-style trendy toy hardware. After the youth business model is verified, the mature emotional engine will be reused in the silver-haired care track to reduce the marginal R&D cost of new businesses and enter the broad elderly care market.
Integrated software and hardware to cover the rigid companionship needs of two groups of people
At this stage, Aolü AI has built a three-in-one product matrix of "software + smart hardware + community".
The software end is divided into two versions: the youth version "Lingyun Companion" takes the mythical immortals and exotic beasts from *Classic of Mountains and Seas* as the original character settings, endows the AI with unique personalities and storylines, and provides personalized emotional companionship; the silver-haired version "Warm Guardian" is set as a gentle and kind elder image, simplifies the interaction logic, features slow speech speed and patient response, and provides daily care, health reminders and warm chatting services.
The hardware end simultaneously lays out two lines of products: for young people, it launches chat-accompanying electronic badges and spirit pet figurines, which have both collection value and interactive functions. For the silver-haired group, it launches a large-button smart companion speaker, which is equipped with a voice wake-up function, requires zero operation threshold, and focuses on home voice companionship and life assistant services. The first batch of chat-accompanying electronic badges is planned to be put into small-batch production of 5,000 units to control inventory risks.
The community side implements segmented operation: for the youth group, it builds the "Shanhai Fan Club", which aggregates users based on interest algorithms and covers diverse interests such as national style creation and trendy toy sharing; for the elderly group, it builds the low-threshold online light community "Neighborhood Chat Club", with sections such as daily interesting stories and past memories, providing a relaxed and warm peer communication space.
In terms of business model, it adopts the two-line driving of To C + To B. C-end revenue comes from three major sectors: youth membership subscription, silver-haired annual service fee, and smart hardware sales. For the B-end, it plans to encapsulate the self-developed emotional engine into a PaaS platform to output customized AI solutions and smart upgrading services to cultural and museum exhibition halls, elderly care institutions and other entities. The customer acquisition channels are mainly based on Generation Z gathering platforms such as Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, cooperating with top KOLs to create hit content, with CAC controlled within 15 yuan; relying on the three retention mechanisms of lossless memory, community and hardware, the expected LTV/CAC can reach more than 6.
Cross-border team in charge, two tracks advancing in an orderly manner
The founding team of Aolü AI covers three major fields: hardcore AI R&D, smart hardware supply chain and brand commercialization. Qingquan, the CEO, once served as product manager at a top Apple dealer, led the domestic implementation of VMware EUC Workspace One, and has more than 10 years of experience in software and hardware commercial operation. Sam Zhong, the CTO, once served as senior architect for McAfee and VMware China EUC, and is proficient in large model fine-tuning, long-term memory mechanism and edge computing. Aimee Hongmeizi, the CMO, once served as beauty editor of ELLE and OnlyLady, and e-commerce creative director of Lily & Beauty, and is good at full-domain brand placement and user growth. The team adopts a layered structure led by senior management and supported by fresh graduates and student interns, which not only stabilizes the business foundation, but also keeps close to the young market.
In terms of financing, Aolü AI has officially launched its angel round financing, with a planned fundraising of 5 million yuan. The funds will be mainly invested in AI computing power, hardware production and operation, product R&D iteration and market promotion for customer acquisition.
According to the plan, the cold start of the youth market will be completed within 0 to 6 months after financing, with the target of MAU exceeding 100,000, monthly comprehensive revenue exceeding 1 million yuan, and realizing positive operating cash flow. From 7 to 12 months, the full-age product matrix will be launched, and efforts will be made in the silver-haired track to drive revenue growth. From the 13th month onwards, the PaaS capability will be opened to output emotional AI technology to more industries, with the target of overall MAU reaching over 1 million.
Aolü AI hopes to fill the emotional gaps of different generations through technology with memory and warmth, so that smart companionship can truly become a warm part of daily life