Monthly revenue exceeds 10 million yuan, AI application company Zhiling Xinjing completes tens of millions of yuan angel round financing | 36Kr Exclusive

In the primary market, AI application companies have gone from highly sought-after assets to hot potatoes in just one year. Yet amid this sluggish sentiment, some AI application firms are still securing financing.

36Kr has learned that Zhiling Xinjing recently completed a multi-million RMB angel round of financing, with Huace Film and TV as the investor. The company's next round of financing is also in progress, expected to be finalized within the year, with Chenrui Capital acting as the financial advisor.

According to Fei Yuanhua, the founder of the company, this round of financing is more aimed at strategic synergy between the two businesses — the two sides will carry out cooperation in talent training, technology R&D, and content co-creation in the future.

Zhiling Xinjing is a company that perfectly fits the corporate profile of the AI era — including the founder, the team has no more than a dozen members, all of whom have a technical background. There is no clear division of labor, each member works alongside multiple Agent avatars, and by leveraging the collaborative work of multiple AI Agents, the team has greatly improved production efficiency.

The core business of Zhiling Xinjing is the canvas-type tool and platform "Neowow", which is mainly targeted at professional individual users, and this part of the business currently contributes more than 90% of the company's revenue. According to Fei Yuanhua, without deep involvement in the AI short drama track, Neowow ranks in the first tier of AI creation tool customers in terms of Token consumption on Volcano Engine — the creation of high-quality AI content can also drive Token consumption. For example, the creation cost per minute of *All Things Grow* is about 2000 RMB, significantly higher than the per-minute production cost of most AI short dramas on the market (the industry average is about 200 RMB per minute).

Compared with some similar AI creation platforms on the market, Neowow has been relatively low-profile, and has built its reputation among practitioners relying on hit AIGC works. The platform focuses more on the group of AI-native creators, forming a community creation atmosphere of active sharing. The AIGC work *All Things Grow* created by the platform's super creators previously went viral, which helped Neowow gain considerable fame among industry practitioners.

In May, the first episode of *All Things Grow* was launched on Douyin, and its view count exceeded 50 million in 10 days. As of August, the third episode was updated, with the total view count successfully exceeding 100 million, making it a top AIGC hit on Douyin.

Neowow also achieved leapfrog growth in August — the platform's single-month revenue in August exceeded tens of millions of RMB, representing a more than 100-fold increase compared to the base at the initial launch in March. The paid conversion rate of registered users on the platform exceeds 16%; during large-scale promotion events, the short-term conversion rate can reach up to 30%.

During this period, Neowow barely spent any money on paid traffic, and achieved user growth mostly through word of mouth. At the same time, as it focuses on the high-consumption, limited-scale group of professional individual creators, Neowow is currently in a profitable state.

Targeting specific groups and building a reputation through high-quality, hit content is the growth path of Zhiling Xinjing, which also forms its differentiated competitive advantage — data assets and community ecosystem.

Neowow encourages creators to share their creation Skills and demonstrate their creation processes, and has built a good community atmosphere to support such sharing. On the platform, whether a Skill is called and how many times it is called are visible, and there are corresponding like and reward mechanisms.

"Our experience is that with the same tool but different Skills, the final presentation can be vastly different," Fei Yuanhua noted.

A complete, high-quality work cannot be produced by a single Skill. When a large number of Skills with different functions need to be called for creation, the creativity and uniqueness of creators can be fully demonstrated.

As a result, the precipitation, reuse and combination of data assets have become the creative feature of Neowow, which also covers the part that large models cannot take into account. Large models have a huge call volume and a large number of users, so they do not have enough energy and time to focus on the usage habits and needs of a specific group of people.

Also focusing on high-quality content creation, compared with some similar AI creation platforms on the market, Neowow was relatively low-profile before, but has accumulated reputation among industry practitioners relying on hit AIGC works — the platform focuses more on the group of AI-native creators, and has formed a community creation atmosphere of active sharing.

The precipitation of data assets benefits from the sound community ecosystem, which in turn becomes the core competitiveness of Neowow. On this basis, Neowow is exploring the ability to amplify the value of the community ecosystem as much as possible.

Since the launch of Seedance 2.0, the group of super creators has grown rapidly, giving birth to viral works such as *Zombie Cleaner* and *The Laid-off Girl*. However, no new business models have emerged in this process, and the monetization paths for super creators are extremely limited, with almost only two options available: taking on advertisement orders and selling courses through live streaming.

The solution Neowow offers is IP commercialization. Individual creators usually do not have the platform resources and operational capabilities required for IP development.

At present, Zhiling Xinjing is advancing the game-oriented development of the AI-native IPs *All Things Grow* and *Floating Light*, planning to launch a Demo version for internal testing in September, and subsequently release the games on Steam and domestic gaming platforms. Meanwhile, the company is also exploring the implementation paths for the film and theatrical release of its AI-native IPs.

During the creation process, the platform provides technical support, while creators are responsible for the art and content parts, giving full play to their respective strengths.

This year, Zhiling Xinjing will also promote the film adaptation of its AI-native IPs for theatrical release.

In addition to providing more monetization paths for creators, Zhiling Xinjing also maintains rapid iteration of its tools to meet the diverse needs of creators.

"Almost all super creators have given me feedback that our greatest strength lies in our response speed. For feedback from core super creators, the team responds very quickly, some problems are handled instantly, and we even update more than a dozen versions a day, iterating at an incredible speed," said Fei Yuanhua.