"X-ORIGIN-AI" Completes Tens of Millions of Yuan Angel Round Financing to Build Embodied Intelligent Companion Robots | First Reported by 36Kr

Written by Wang Fangyu

Edited by Su Jianxun

36Kr has learned that Shenzhen Xuanyuan Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as X-ORIGIN-AI) has recently completed a tens of millions of yuan angel round of financing. This round of financing is led by Alpha Startups, with several industrial investors participating, and Ren Chen Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. The financing funds will be mainly used for technology research and development, talent recruitment, and market expansion.

X-ORIGIN-AI is committed to creating a full-scene consumer-grade AI robot product that accompanies the human life cycle. Its first product is an AI companion robot for children.

In terms of the team, the founder and CEO, Li Yunzhou, is a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute of Harbin Institute of Technology and an experienced serial entrepreneur. He once led the team to win the first heavyweight fighting robot competition international championship in China during his university years; the CMO, Yu Haitao, was previously mainly responsible for the Tmall Import and Export Business Group's US ecological business and has rich experience in going overseas.

Li Yunzhou told 36Kr that currently, X-ORIGIN-AI has completely built a technology architecture belonging to the AI era, from the system software layer to the terminal technology layer and then to the application layer.

Under this architecture, the company's first AI companion robot product has been developed and mass-produced. It is expected to be launched on the overseas crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in March 2025, and the domestic market will also be opened simultaneously.

The image of X-ORIGIN-AI's first robot product               Source: Authorized by the enterprise

In the past two years, the AI companion industry has developed rapidly, becoming one of the fastest-growing tracks in the current artificial intelligence field, and its huge development potential has been widely recognized. A report recently released by the Tencent Research Institute pointed out that compared with the European and American markets, AI companions have a more extensive landing foundation in China. The AI companion market can reach the hundreds of billions level within 3 - 5 years.

In Li Yunzhou's view, simply "stacking materials" in the hardware aspect of AI companion robots has a minimal improvement in the user's perception. Therefore, the focus should be on the deep integration of the terminal-side control and the large language model.

"Since its establishment, we have been continuously improving the interactive texture between the robot and humans," Li Yunzhou said.

Currently, the functions of products such as AI toys and AI desktop robots on the market are relatively homogeneous, and they all invoke the large model through the conversation method. However, Li Yunzhou believes that to achieve high-quality AI companionship, it is necessary to understand the user's emotions and personalized information, and provide a real "emotional value". If it is only a "shell" of the large model, it cannot truly generate "companionship".

X-ORIGIN-AI uses the terminal-side model control system to provide personalized information assistance capabilities, creating a system that interacts with the large language model. It combines the robot's perception data to form the bionic memory of the robot in the system based on the working logic of the human brain. With the assistance of the added personalized interaction dimension information, the large model can more accurately provide interaction analysis, thereby demonstrating a higher-quality human-computer interaction ability.

In addition, X-ORIGIN-AI has also built an operating system with AI control as the core for the AI companion robot. Developers can develop various agents on this system. Subsequently, this system will also continuously update various new functions for users through remote OTA.

The strategic planning of X-ORIGIN-AI is not only limited to this type of AI companion robot product, but is based on each person's exclusive AI model to create a full-scene consumer product that can accompany children, adults, the elderly, and other stages, becoming a digital life that understands users.

"The young technical team must embrace the AI era," Li Yunzhou said. "X-ORIGIN-AI will continue to invest in research and development, continuously improve the interactive texture between the robot and humans, and through continuous product innovation, bring users more intelligent and personalized AI robot products."

Xu Siqing, the founding partner of Alpha Startups, said: In the interactive robot track, the four points of vertical data, model capabilities, market share foundation, and promotion capabilities, coupled with the rapid iteration capabilities provided by the industrial chain, the Chinese team has a unique advantage in the international market. Our first impression of Li Yunzhou is that he is an entrepreneur with an extraordinary impact. The titles of the international fighting robot competition champion, Ph.D. from Harbin Institute of Technology, and serial entrepreneur are their entrepreneurial capital. After talking for more than an hour in an office filled with robot parts, messy yet orderly, we decided to give them the first sum of money. Of course, their fluent answers and demonstrations when being "interrogated" like a storm about the model capabilities is also a necessary threshold. In the field of interactive robots, such a "combination of software and hardware" team has the greatest potential.