AI investors are eyeing Bilibili UP creators
On September 5, in Shanghai, Bilibili's "Build in Bilibili · AI Creation Open Competition" announced the winners of its first season.
This AI competition with no participation threshold has a total prize pool of 1.43 million yuan. UP owner @Dr.W and AI Nekomimi won the first prize with *Project N.E.K.O.*; UP owner @Zha Keji's *Vagante 3D* and UP owner @Electrogrilled Ribbonfish's *Gates of the World* won the second and third prizes respectively.
In terms of competition scale, this is a very lively event for AI developers. From June 5 to August 20, 13,400 people submitted entries, with more than 30,000 works in total. The cumulative total viewing duration exceeded 350 million minutes, and over 1 million users participated in voting. Among the contestants, more than 88% are UP owners with less than 10,000 followers, 64% have no professional development background, and over 80% are one-person teams.
More notably, what this group of people created are not just AI images and AI short films, but AI cooking robots, AI vision-assisting glasses for the blind, AI open-world games, as well as highly "Bilibili-style" products such as AI nekomimi, AI Zhou Dynasty historical document translator, AI big dog barking simulator...
In terms of AI application creation quality, user activity and participant scale, this AI competition is undoubtedly top-tier in China, and is no less impressive than the Demo Days held by major VCs.
Before the competition, HSG, ZhenFund, NVIDIA, Zhipu AI, and Vivo jointly provided strong support, offering models, computing power and Tokens. Many participating AI projects had already secured financing before the award ceremony. For example, the Shell-breaking Robot developed by UP owner @Xu Huazhe Harry received tens of millions of US dollars in angel round investment from funds including Yunqi Capital, Baidu and Shunwei Capital; the Space-Time Telephone Bureau project of UP owner @Qimiaolabi - Duqian A received a ten-million-yuan angel round led by Jinqiu Fund and co-invested by Shoucheng Holdings.
Unconsciously, more and more people are learning AI, using AI, demonstrating AI achievements and discussing the AI ecosystem on Bilibili...
Bilibili's identity has changed, and perhaps even Bilibili itself has not realized it.
01
AI Belongs to the Young Generation, and the Young Generation Belongs to Bilibili
In the past few years, there has been only one main theme in the AI industry, which is "youth".
According to data from international venture capital firm Antler, in 2024, the average age of founders of global AI unicorns was only 29. The iteration of cutting-edge AI technology is so fast that the value structure of accumulated experience is changing dramatically, and post-95s and post-00s star entrepreneurs are emerging in endlessly, both at home and abroad.
The same is true on the AI usage side. At present, heavy AI users at home and abroad are extremely young. According to Accenture data, 85% of Generation Z (people born between 1995 and 2009) frequently use AI tools, 8 percentage points higher than the sample of all age groups. According to data from CNNIC, among generative AI users in China, the number of users aged 19 and below is about 186 million, ranking first among all age groups.
People who develop AI are young, people who use AI are young, and people who play with AI are young.
This makes Bilibili's user structure particularly interesting.
According to the 2026 mid-year financial report data, the average age of Bilibili users is only 26.5 years old, with 117 million daily active users, and the average daily usage duration reaches 113 minutes, which is equivalent to watching a nearly 2-hour movie.
Looking at the participant list of the Bilibili AI Creation Open Competition, this "youthful" vibe is even more obvious.
Take the UP owner @Dr.W and AI Nekomimi, the creator of the award-winning work *Project N.E.K.O.* as an example. Dr.W was born in 1998, studied at Peking University for his bachelor's degree, and later went to Michigan State University in the United States to pursue his doctorate, with research directions covering many cutting-edge AI fields such as graph neural networks and Transformer. Long before that, he was already a long-time Bilibili user, and became a Bilibili UP owner back in 2013 when he was still in middle school.
When he returned to China, Dr.W was already a highly favored target for major AI headhunters and investors, with countless offers and investment invitations pouring in. But in the end, he chose to start his own business independently, creating this two-dimensional style "AI Nekomimi". The reason is simple — he just loves it.
It is hard to explain what AI nekomimi and digital life are to people who do not understand "otaku culture", but to some extent, the popular meme from *The Wandering Earth* in the comment section "I want to give her a complete life" is a perfect description.
In a sense, this also explains why the overlap between AI practitioners and Bilibili's user base is so significant. Today's most cutting-edge group of young AI talents are the generation who grew up nurtured by internet content communities. The identity boundaries between AI researchers, AI users and AI creators have long become increasingly blurred.
A 22-year-old student may be writing his first product with Claude Code on the one hand, and be a top-tier "captain" (paid subscriber) of other AI UP owners on the other hand; a PhD student may read the latest papers in the morning and upload a Demo in the community in the evening; a CEO may just finish updating the code, and then immediately start recording a "cyber unboxing" video.
A community ultimately depends on its user attributes, and Bilibili just has the young user base in the Chinese internet that highly overlaps with AI users.
At the 2026 H1 earnings call, Li Ni, COO of Bilibili, said that the consumption duration of AI knowledge content on Bilibili increased by 72% year on year this quarter. Bilibili has become a widely recognized AI learning video community across the entire network, and "AI users and Bilibili users are highly overlapping".
02
The "Demo Venue" for China's AI Products
Based on such a user structure, many interesting things will naturally "grow" on this platform.
For example, unconsciously, Bilibili has actually become the premier launch Demo venue for many AI projects.
In the past, the functions of traditional internet products were usually clear enough. For a bookkeeping app, a browser, or a set of enterprise SaaS, you could generally tell what problems it solves through function descriptions and a few screenshots.
But after the emergence of large AI models, the situation of AI Agents, AI games, AI generative interactive products and so on has become much more complex. Products labeled the same as "AI assistant" may have completely different memory mechanisms, interaction methods and Agent capabilities behind them. Whether a generative game is really playable, or what a robot has actually learned, the information provided by text introductions is very limited. Users need to see it running, experience it, and then consider whether to use it.
This makes Demo take over part of the functions of product manuals, launch conferences and even advertisements in the AI era.
And Bilibili just meets this demand perfectly.
First of all, the high overlap between the community user profile and AI users saves enterprises a lot of invalid advertising investment. Secondly, Bilibili users have the patience and interest to listen to complex demonstrations that last for several minutes or even tens of minutes. Users are willing to learn, and creators are also used to explaining the technical process.
The most critical point is that the story does not end after the video is released. UP owners can continue to release the second and third episodes, turning a single product launch into a continuous development log. In this "Build in Bilibili · AI Creation Open Competition", a large number of participating projects have gone through multiple versions of iterations. Even "amateur projects" with no previous experience in AI development or being a Bilibili UP owner can find their target users here.
For example, participating UP owner @Electrogrilled Ribbonfish had no prior follower accumulation, and the first video he released on Bilibili was the competition submission. However, the Demo of his AI generative open-world game *Gates of the World* achieved an astonishing 2.75 million views, and was selected into the top 10 winning works of the competition.
There are also many "cross-border players" who have no prior AI development experience. UP owner @Qimiaolabi - Duqian A, who received investment from Jinqiu Fund, used to work as a film director. His participating project is "AI Space-Time Telephone", with the introduction: "On Father's Day, I used AI to make a space-time telephone and called my late father."
The path of another UP owner @Xu Huazhe Harry is more familiar to the star AI entrepreneurs in the primary market. He is an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University, and the head of the Embodied Intelligence Laboratory of Tsinghua University. Shortly after its establishment, Shell-breaking Robot completed tens of millions of US dollars in angel round financing led by Yunqi Capital, with participation from Shunwei Capital, Xiaomi Strategic Investment, and BV Baidu Ventures. Only a few months later, the company announced a hundred-million-dollar level Pre-A round of financing jointly led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners China.
Putting all these people in the same competition, you will see a very interesting spectrum.
First of all, all of them, without exception, take Bilibili as the Demo venue for product premiere and idea verification. Many of them are long-time Bilibili users, who may come from all walks of life with different academic and professional backgrounds.
But they share the same discourse system. They will smile knowingly at every YPM meme picture and *Hetalia* sticker in the comment section. Bilibili's community culture and bullet screen culture have seeped into their daily lives, and they in turn nourish the community through product output.
"All our live streams, videos and posts from the very beginning of the project have only been posted on Bilibili," Dr.W told *Intelligent Emergence*.
As for why he never considered other platforms, Dr.W's answer is very simple: "Because I don't use those platforms."
03
The Fake "AI Community" vs. the Real "AI Community"
During the communication with the participating UP owners of this competition, a common feeling kept popping up in conversations.
"The product roadmap naturally grows out of the comment section", "This requirement has appeared so many times in bullet screens and comments that it's impossible for us to ignore it", "Some users voluntarily answered questions for us in the comment section, and even carried out 'relay development'".
Yes, Bilibili's comment section is a gathering place for "AI application enthusiasts" that is no less impressive than any professional developer community.
A large number of developers represented by *Project N.E.K.O.* first publish their immature Demo publicly. Bilibili users put forward requirements, suggestions and product roadmaps, developers continue to iterate, and the new Demo brings the next batch of users, even the next batch of "amateur developers" who voluntarily participate in the open source plan out of interest and passion.
Dr.W told *Intelligent Emergence* that during the competition, the entire collection of videos for *Project N.E.K.O.* received more than 17,000 comments in total, among which valuable requirements often appeared dozens or even hundreds of times. "Even if you want to ignore these voices, you simply can't."
A typical case is the co-play plugin for the game *Calabiyau* in *Project N.E.K.O.*. Before the competition, Dr.W had never even heard of this game. However, after the first video was released, some users asked "Can the nekomimi play *Calabiyau* with me?" After that, similar requirements kept appearing in the comment sections of different videos, and the team finally decided to actually develop this plugin.
After the first version was launched, many players voluntarily helped other users troubleshoot problems in the comment section. Later, some people even spontaneously joined the open source project of *Project N.E.K.O.* to carry out optimization and function development, which eventually became a "co-development" effort between creators and users.
Dr.W described to *Intelligent Emergence* that for the first time, he felt very concretely that "the product roadmap can really grow out of Bilibili's comment section".
In fact, they accidentally caught up with the latest rhythm of project development in the AI era — BIP (Build in Public).
With the emergence of large models, Vibe Coding and various programming and development Agents, the threshold for AI programming has become lower and lower, but correspondingly, the threshold for "finding users" has become higher and higher.
Whether an AI product can find the first batch of users willing to use it, whether developers can know in time why users stay and why they leave, what users really want, what is the creator's "self-indulgent work", and what is the real user demand.
The information that traditional developers need to piece together gradually through Focus Groups, user surveys and Demo Days can be gradually satisfied in the public development process.
This is exactly the BIP idea that is very popular in Silicon Valley right now. Developers attract attention, build communities, get user feedback by sharing publicly, and polish their products with the real feedback from the community.
Overseas, many communities of this kind have already operated successfully. Product Hunt can serve as the cold start entry for new products, Hacker News has long been an important place for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers to observe new technologies, and GitHub allows investment institutions to spot outstanding developers at an earlier stage.
On top of these foundations, Bilibili has an extra variable: the product is more deeply bound to the creator himself.
When investors see a Demo video, they can judge the creator's technical accumulation by reviewing his past videos, and also see the version changes of a project over several months. The comment section retains users' real problems, and the views and interactions form the earliest demand signals. More and more investors are paying attention to Bilibili: who made the product, how was it made, how fast is the iteration, what do users want, and whether the market recognizes it.
This is probably also the reason why HSG came to the site of this "Build in Bilibili · AI Creation Open Competition".
If more and more AI projects complete product verification on Bilibili before registering their companies, Bilibili's role will continue to move upstream of the industry, gradually evolving from a Demo venue into a platform for startup incubation, discovery, and even investment and financing.
That's why we said at the beginning of this article that Bilibili's identity has changed. And perhaps even Bilibili itself has not realized this point.
Conclusion
The Capital Market May Still Understand Bilibili with the Logic of the Previous Generation
In the past, when people talked about Bilibili's AI business, their focus easily fell on "AI content growth" and "AI advertising growth". But unconsciously, the logic for understanding Bilibili has already changed.
The new generation of AI developers, AI users and AI players are generally young and have distinct personalities. Most of them are die-hard Bilibili users. After they grow up to become AI creators and users, Bilibili naturally becomes the platform for them to host and release their works.
This naturally grown AI community culture makes more AI products choose Bilibili for their first public appearance. And Bilibili users, who share the same discourse system with these creators, do not hesitate to give extremely positive comments, feedback and constructive suggestions, which in turn influence the next generation of product development by developers.
After that, some projects go on to secure financing and enter the market, while sharp capital institutions in turn actively