An emotional intelligent jewelry hardware company has completed its angel round of financing, with enterprises from the Honor AI Connect ecosystem and other investors participating in the investment | Hard Krypton Exclusive

By Huang Nan

Edited by Yuan Silai

Hard Krypton learned that SHAKESPEARE, an emotional intelligent jewelry hardware enterprise, has recently completed tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing, jointly invested by Jixuan Intelligence, an enterprise under the Glory AI Connect ecosystem, and Ruiyu Holdings, a leading domestic jewelry DP service provider. Potential Capital has long served as the exclusive financial advisor of the company. The raised funds will be mainly used for core algorithm iteration, development of multi-modal emotional interaction models, R&D of jewelry craftsmanship for new product categories, and expansion of global distribution channels.

Founded in 2025 in Hangzhou, SHAKESPEARE positions itself as an "emotional intelligent jewelry" brand, committed to deeply integrating traditional jewelry craftsmanship with smart wearable technology to provide intelligent jewelry products with emotional companionship capabilities. Its first product, an AI physical and mental health companion ring, was officially launched in the Chinese market in April 2026.

Yang Xunzhong, the founder of SHAKESPEARE, has previously served as COO of Inman, founder of Inman Underwear, and general manager of Kans. The Ruiyu Holdings he founded is a leading brand service provider with annual sales exceeding 2 billion yuan, having served mainstream domestic jewelry brands including Chow Tai Seng, Chow Tai Fook, CHJ, and Laomiao. The core team comes from top universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University, covering fields including computer science, artificial intelligence, and medical psychology, forming a composite capability base that integrates consumption, technology, medical care, and aesthetics.

A collision over category definition is taking place between the jewelry and smart wearable sectors.

The global jewelry market has an existing stock size of hundreds of billions of US dollars, and the smart wearable track is also in a stage of rapid growth. However, there has long been a blank zone at the intersection of the two industries. The core value of traditional jewelry lies in its material, craftsmanship, and aesthetic expression, but its interaction mode is one-way: when a user wears a ring, the ring cannot perceive, respond, or provide companionship. The core value of smart wearables lies in continuous data collection and feedback, but their product forms have long been limited by the paradigm of digital products, with design logic long centered on functional parameters. There is a certain gap between such products and jewelry-level aesthetics, making it difficult for them to carry emotional expression and aesthetic value.

To deconstruct SHAKESPEARE's product definition, one cannot avoid the fundamental differences in the underlying logic of the jewelry and smart wearable industries. According to Yang Xunzhong, the opportunity in this track does not lie in simply stuffing smart modules into jewelry shells, but in re-answering the question of "how jewelry understands users" in every link from product definition and hardware architecture to process path.

Among them, the company's first released intelligent jewelry product, the Prologue Series, took more than a year of R&D and went through more than ten version iterations. In the millimeter-level internal space, SHAKESPEARE adopted the architecture solution of "low-power BLE main control + highly integrated PPG front end + six-axis motion sensor", and integrated core devices such as body temperature sensor, acceleration sensor, and PPG optical sensor.

The first intelligent jewelry product, the Prologue Series (Source/Enterprise)

In terms of battery life, the product adopts an intermittent adaptive sampling strategy instead of continuous high-frequency collection: it increases the PPG sampling frequency in resting and sleep scenarios to ensure data accuracy, and actively reduces the frequency in exercise scenarios to control power consumption. The total battery capacity of the device is about 14.1 mAh, with a battery life of 7 to 10 days. It supports users to customize the monitoring frequency, and achieves IP68 water resistance at the same time. The total weight of the device is controlled at 3 to 6 grams, which is almost unnoticeable when worn.

However, what truly forms the moat is not the stacking of components, but the cross-industry collaboration capability between electronic engineering and jewelry craftsmanship.

"The combination of smart rings and jewelry is not as simple as imagined. It is not just a matter of putting two things together," Yang Xunzhong said. The birth of a finished product requires crossing five major links including component selection, electronic structure rearrangement, glue injection sealing, real gold electroplating, and manual polishing and inlaying, with more than 20 processes completed by cross-regional collaboration of multiple factories.

One of the core difficulties of the product is to fully fit the electronic chip into a truly closed ring body of the ring. Many smart rings on the market are limited by component layout, and the inner ring is not a complete circle: there is no space for components such as chips, so they can only occupy the inner ring to form a raised platform structure.

The SHAKESPEARE team redesigned the PCB board structure, eliminated the traditional raised platform of the charging port, realized the integrated ring-shaped forming of the electronic movement, and adopted an ergonomic arc inner chamfer for the inner ring. Finally, the precious metal inner ring touched by users is complete and round without any protrusions, and the precious metal material further enhances the overall texture of the product.

Internal structure diagram of the ring (Source/Enterprise)

Another differentiated innovation is to reverse the order of electroplating and chip assembly. The previously common method was to electroplate first and then install the chip. Since electronic components are fragile and high temperature and high acid environments may damage the chip, completing the shell electroplating first and then installing the chip is the most convenient path. But at the same time, the cost is that the shell cannot be polished as a whole after electroplating, and the surface texture can never reach the jewelry-level standard.

SHAKESPEARE did the opposite: it first assembled the chip and completed protection, then carried out electroplating (such as silver plating / gold plating), applied a nano-protective coating on the shell surface, and performed jewelry-level manual polishing. The production cost of the whole process is several times that of the industry's conventional solution. The product forming is completed by traditional jewelry craftsmen. After 3D printing and mold reversing, manual fine repair, the lab-grown diamonds are inlaid with high-luxury jewelry prong setting technology, and the whole process is under the quality control of a professional team. The ring shell is made of 925 sterling silver, and the high-end version is made of 18K gold and pure gold precious metal materials, taking into account the wearing texture and value preservation attributes.

Hardware craftsmanship solves the threshold of product physical wearing experience, while emotional intelligence solves the problem of "how to make users willing to wear it".

Yang Xunzhong told Hard Krypton that traditional smart rings focus on physical health data, such as heart rate, blood oxygen, and sleep quality. Based on physical data, SHAKESPEARE raises the dimension to the psychological level. "We will first project users' emotional changes, stress levels and mental vitality through data such as heart rate variability (HRV) and skin electricity, and then give solutions through interactive communication."

The first intelligent jewelry product, the Prologue Series (Source/Enterprise)

The team independently developed an emotional intelligence system based on personalized machine algorithms and semantic generation models, covering a complete closed loop of data collection, data processing, state modeling, emotional computing and application services. After the user wears the ring, the system will gradually establish a personalized emotional baseline by continuously collecting physical data and combining user interactions. As the wearing time increases, the system's understanding of the user's emotional state will continue to deepen, gradually evolving from perceiving emotional fluctuations to predicting emotional needs.

"Functionally, traditional smart rings only solve problems at the physical level, while we solve problems at the psychological level at the same time," Yang Xunzhong said.

According to estimates by Precedence Research, the market size of behavioral and mental health services in the United States reached 94.8 billion US dollars in 2025; in China, a survey by the Sleep Research Association shows that more than 60% of young people face different degrees of sleep and emotional stress problems. At present, booking a psychologist in first-tier cities alone often requires several months of waiting.

SHAKESPEARE's positioning is to embed emotional perception and companionship capabilities into users' daily lives through smart jewelry worn daily, and provide a low-threshold, high-frequency psychological support method in addition to health monitoring.

The starting point for all content, channels and overseas paths is not the brand narrative itself, but where users are, in what posture, and why they are willing to be "seen".

In terms of channels and marketing, the channels and marketing in the domestic market follow the path of "content marketing - mind positioning - online and offline conversion". Before the product was launched, the team completed high-density exposure through cooperation with celebrities and KOLs, establishing brand awareness while reserving potential for subsequent conversion. Market feedback has also verified this rhythm — during the Tmall 88 Membership Festival event, SHAKESPEARE won the first, third and fifth places in the smart ring single product ranking list.

Offline, with its past cooperation experience with more than 80% of listed jewelry brands, the product quickly reaches users through multiple forms such as co-branded products, pop-up stores, buyer stores, and digital partner stores. At present, its products have settled in the INNO100 Global Innovation Flagship Store and the Glory Shenzhen Bay Flagship Store, and will later enter thousands of stores under the Glory brand as well as channels including Gome, Sundan, Machine Time, and China Duty Free Group. It plans to open its first offline flagship store in 2028, and gradually expand to core CBD business districts in various cities.

The promotion of the overseas market follows the gradient strategy of "North America first, Europe for follow-up, Japan and South Korea for penetration". North America is a high-potential region for technology and geek culture, serving as the first stop for brand potential spillover; Europe, relying on the right to speak in luxury goods and design, further strengthens the brand's design language and craftsmanship narrative; Japan and South Korea, leveraging the penetration of trend and IP culture, complete cultural identity and mind anchoring in the core Asian market. This is not a simple geographical expansion, but a globalization path designed based on cultural adaptation and mind gradient.

SHAKESPEARE product series (Source/Enterprise)

SHAKESPEARE's user strategy does not regard core users as simple buyers, but integrates them into the chain of brand co-construction. After completing the first round of mind penetration through KOL content cooperation, the team gradually precipitates early users as seed users of the brand through co-creation programs, limited releases, offline experiences and other methods. These people are not only early feedback providers for product iteration, but also key nodes for circle communication, and users themselves can in turn become amplifiers of brand potential.

The domestic conversion matrix, the overseas potential gradient and the circle fission of users are finally integrated into the same long-term brand asset, enabling users to be accurately identified, effectively received and continuously impressed at every touch point.

The core value of smart jewelry does not lie in stuffing sensors into rings, but in taking emotional understanding as the anchor point to reconstruct the relationship between people and accessories. Jewelry is no longer a static ornament, but a digital soulmate that can perceive, accompany and respond. Carrying intelligent perception with jewelry craftsmanship and driving interactive experience with emotional algorithms, SHAKESPEARE is trying to redefine the boundary of the word "wear".

The following is an excerpt from the interview between Hard Krypton and Yang Xunzhong, the founder of SHAKESPEARE (slightly edited):

Hard Krypton: From the perspective of hardware form, the physiological signals that a ring can capture are limited. How to understand the user's emotional state through a ring?

Yang Xunzhong: The dimensions of signals that a ring can collect are indeed limited, so what we do is not "mind reading", but "body reading", that is, to infer the possibility of emotional state through changes in physiological signals. The core signals of the current generation of products come from three aspects: heart rate variability (HRV), body movement data, and basic physiological signals such as body temperature, heart rate, and sleep.

HRV is one of the most fully studied physiological indicators in the field of emotion recognition at present. When a person is in a state of stress or anxiety, the sympathetic nerve dominates, and HRV will decrease significantly; while in a state of relaxation and pleasure, the parasympathetic nerve is activated, and HRV will increase. The HRV features we collect are from two dimensions: continuous time domain and frequency domain. In the time domain, we look at the standard deviation of NN intervals, and in the frequency domain, we look at the ratio change of low-frequency and high-frequency components.

The skin electrical response tracks the subtle fluctuations of skin conductivity. This signal is directly regulated by sweat gland activity, which is driven by the sympathetic nerve — the stronger the emotional arousal, the more obvious the skin electrical response. This is an independent dimension of emotional intensity.

Body movement data is used for context labeling. When a person is exercising, the heart rate will naturally increase. Of course, the system also needs to distinguish this kind of "physiological fluctuation" from "emotional fluctuation".

The algorithm is implemented in two steps. The first step is baseline modeling: in the first few days of user wearing, the system collects data in multiple scenarios such as rest, exercise, work, and sleep to establish the user's personal physiological signal baseline, instead of applying a unified population threshold. The second step is anomaly detection: when the real-time signal deviates from the baseline by a certain amplitude, the system marks it as an emotional fluctuation event, and then continuously corrects the judgment logic of the model by combining the user's activity state at that time and subsequent interactive feedback.

At present, this system can give a preliminary judgment of emotional trend within 2 to 3 days after the user wears it. With the accumulation of data and the increase of interactive feedback, the personalized accuracy of the model will continue to improve. In addition, the second-generation product we are developing will add more auxiliary signals.

Hard Krypton: According to industry data, smart wearable devices are generally facing the problem of continuous decline in wearing rate, and many users leave their devices idle after one or two weeks of purchase. How does SHAKESPEARE respond to this problem in product definition?

Yang Xunzhong: This is a long-discussed but never well-solved problem in the smart wearable industry: user retention. Sales volume and active users are two completely different dimensions. After many products are sold, users will stop wearing them once the novelty wears off.

The reason is that the product definition of the vast majority of smart rings on the market before starts from "functional hardware", and the core design logic revolves around sensor arrangement, chip selection and data accuracy. This determines that in terms of form, it is first a device that users "wear for a certain function", so users will consciously wear it when they need monitoring, and their willingness to wear it in daily scenarios will continue to decline.

The root cause is that there is a lack of aesthetic connection and emotional connection between traditional smart wearable brands and users, resulting in the final wearing motivation driven by pragmatism.

SHAKESPEARE has a different starting point. We are first a jewelry brand, and then a smart device. The first principle of jewelry is that "wearing itself constitutes value". Users will wear it even if it has no function. If a ring is not good-looking enough, not textured enough, and cannot be integrated into daily wear, it cannot be an item that will be worn every day. When users are willing to wear it for the sake of aesthetics itself, the preconditions for data collection and algorithm optimization are