AI companionship products only burn tokens, while fortune-related products lack effective user retention strategies: Lingyi Weiyao enters the emotional fortune sector by leveraging the "Chinese-style anime IP + Bazi numerology" model.

Against the backdrop of the macroeconomic adjustment cycle, the demand for emotional consumption keeps rising. Meanwhile, the rise of Chinese traditional style trends drives the upgrading of traditional cultural consumption. With its innovative positioning of "AI + Chinese-style two-dimensional IP", Shanghai Lingyi Weiyao Technology Co., Ltd. enters the AI + emotional fortune track, creating exclusive emotional fortune companions for at least 500 million potential users worldwide.

I. Unprofitable AI companionship: Chatting only earns token revenue, how to turn companionship into a high-value business?

The project originated in July 2025, from the industry discussion between founder Yang Kongci and her former colleagues:

• The team found that the current AI companionship track generally faces profitability challenges. Pure chat platforms either fall into the controversy of forcing users to pay, or adopt a low-price strategy that can hardly cover computing power costs. Moreover, they rely on users to generate content spontaneously. Once user churn occurs, no new roles will be created on the creation side, and users on the consumption side cannot experience new roles, which easily leads to a vicious circle.

• For the traditional emotional fortune track, there are pain points such as uneven service quality, difficult supervision of manual services, legal risks borne by platforms, strong product tool attributes, and lack of long-term user retention.

• Combined with the founder's understanding of Eastern numerology culture, the team judged that the core demand of fortune consultation is essentially emotional venting and stress relief, which highly aligns with the user demands of AI companionship. Therefore, the Yazhi project was launched. The official R&D started at the end of 2025, and full-scale promotion has been carried out since mid-2026. It is expected to be launched simultaneously at home and abroad in October 2026. At present, the review and filing of application stores on various domestic platforms have been basically completed, and the project has entered the final sprint stage before launch.

The core innovation of the project lies in adopting the composite and cross operation route of AI + IP, forming a clear differentiation from similar products on the market:

• Traditional emotional fortune products do not understand AI technology and gamified operation, nor do they vertically focus on the eight characters numerology track, so they cannot form user memory anchors.

• Pure AI fortune products lack emotional value, and can only answer questions once, which only meets immediate needs, and cannot form long-term user retention and brand awareness.

• Ordinary AI companion products do not have the professional ability of fortune service; and because users are always consuming newly created roles, forming a psychological inertia of being fond of the new and tired of the old, the products cannot realize IP-based operation and lack long-term vitality.

Lingyi Weiyao just fills this market gap. At the technical and operational levels, the project has built a two-layer moat:

• Externally, relying on the ten Heavenly Stems Chinese-style two-dimensional IP with complete copyright, the project personifies the traditional symbols of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, builds a resonant community of like-minded people, encourages users to create secondary works based on the Heavenly Stems and Five Elements character settings, reduces customer acquisition costs through cultural resonance, and builds community barriers. In the future, it will also launch high-premium cultural and creative peripheral products through in-depth co-branding with scenic spots, intangible cultural heritage and well-known brands.

• Internally, through daily fortune push and gamified tasks, the project seizes the golden usage scenarios of users in the morning and before bedtime. The time and energy invested by users constitute extremely high sunk costs; and the real experience and communication data of users continuously feed back the iteration of the AI model, forming a data flywheel of "the more you use it, the more accurate it is", which effectively improves user retention.

II. Commercial Value: With such a segmented market, how large is the remaining space of the market scale? How long will it take to make a profit?

From the perspective of the market environment, the growth of emotional consumption and healing economy has become a clear trend: the scale of China's healing economy is expected to rise to 13.45 trillion yuan in 2025, and the compound annual growth rate of China's digital cultural industry from 2023 to 2029 is about 11%. According to conservative estimation, the potential market size that the project can reach exceeds 11.5 billion yuan. The core target users are young people aged 18-35 who are interested in Chinese-style aesthetics, two-dimensional culture and Eastern numerology, among which female users are expected to account for more than two thirds. This group is exactly the core main force of current self-pleasing consumption, with outstanding willingness and ability to pay.

The project adopts a layered and diversified business model: in the early online stage, membership subscription is taken as the basic revenue, and value-added services such as gamified props and in-depth numerology reports (overseas only) are gradually launched; offline, it will gradually test high-premium cultural and creative peripheral products to cultivate users' physical consumption habits, and finally form a diversified revenue structure covering membership subscription, value-added services, cultural and creative sales, and brand co-branding.

According to the project plan, in the initial stage of launch, seed users will be obtained through Xiaohongshu delivery. After verifying the market demand, customer acquisition will be gradually expanded. It is expected that the cumulative gross profit will turn positive and the upfront cost will be recovered two and a half years after launch, the annual revenue will reach 100 million yuan in the third year, and the annual net profit will reach 100 million yuan in the fourth year.

III. Team Background: AI, games, two-dimensional, IP, fortune, overseas expansion... Is there such a wide range of experience?

Founder Juzi has accumulated full-process experience in product design, game planning, user operation, project management, and overseas localization at Minimax, miHoYo, Yaoji Technology, and Taomee Games. She was interviewed by SMG as a representative of young entrepreneurs. It is worth mentioning that she participated in the 0-to-1 development of Glow, the predecessor of "Xingye", the pioneer of AI companionship products. She has successful project experience in the field of AI emotional companionship, and also has diversified insights into two-dimensional IP and gamified operation.

IV. Project Progress and Financing Demand: Seeking seed round financing for IP content production and small-scale traffic delivery pilot

At present, the biggest challenge in the process of project promotion is the funding gap, which is used for recruiting operation personnel, producing IP content and advertising delivery. The expected milestones are user volume, 7-day retention rate and monthly retention rate indicators.

At present, the project has completed the copyright registration of its own IP. Most of the seed users who participated in the internal test in the early stage are groups who love Chinese-style two-dimensional culture and numerology. In private interviews, many test users gave feedback that "I must be one of the first batch of users when it is officially launched", "the Q version characters are so cute", "it is much more accurate than products like Doubao". In addition, many users also expressed expectations for the subsequent launched IP peripheral products.

For the future, Lingyi Weiyao has a clear and definite plan: after the launch in October this year, it will first complete the MVP version, collect feedback for rapid iteration; in 2027, it will complete the construction of cultural content community and strive to reach the scale of one million users; then gradually open up the link between IP co-branding and cultural and creative consumption; in 2028, it will launch the overseas expansion plan, bringing traditional Chinese metaphysics culture and Eastern aesthetics to European and American countries, and building a global cultural and psychological brand. Finally, a complete ecological closed loop and brand barrier of "AI + Eastern culture + emotional healing" will be constructed.

Founder Juzi said that the deepest experience from the entrepreneurship journey so far is that do not create pseudo-demands for self-movement; only projects that grow out of the real needs of users can have vitality. At present, many AI projects are pursuing luxuriously packaged concepts that make people confused. Lingyi Weiyao just wants to respond to the real emotional needs of users, and at the same time present the culture passed down by our ancestors in a way that young people like, and even spread it to the whole world. The team does not want to make a quick buck through high-end pseudo-concepts and run away, but to truly narrow the distance between the ancient Eastern culture and the new generation, and build an evergreen IP.

"I have been thinking about a question, why tarot cards are so popular in China; why can't we make Eastern metaphysics a global trend?" Juzi said at last.