The first virtual human financing this year was released.
The investment community has learned that Hangzhou Liweike Technology Co., Ltd. shows a change of shareholders, and a new ByteDance affiliate, Beijing Quantum Leap Technology Co., Ltd., has been added. Today, the company officially confirmed that this round is li Weike's first round of financing, which is exclusively invested by ByteDance.
Li Weike, this somewhat unfamiliar name is a virtual girl, she was created by Ru Yi, the former head of the intelligent terminal of Alibaba Industrial Intelligence Labs (A.I. Labs). Founded in October 2021, the company has created an AR technology brand named "Li Weike" and a virtual IP image of the same name. "We want to build Li Weike into China's first ai virtual digital person with a real emotional connection, so that our AR glasses not only have beautiful looks, but also have interesting souls." The main creative team said.
This is another shot by ByteDance in the AI virtual track. Previously, ByteDance had wholly invested in a company that owned the copyright of the virtual idol group A-SOUL; acquired VR startup Pico, laying out the upstream and downstream of AI virtual interaction. Behind this investment, the army of virtual people is ushering in a big explosion - whether it is Cui Xiaopan, the latest Vanke best newcomer of the year, or Liu Yexi, who has risen to millions of fans overnight, they are entering the real human world.
Ali resigned and became a virtual person
Just byteDance exclusive voted
Two months after its establishment, li Weike won the investment of ByteDance, and Li Weike was inseparable from a technology bull - Ru Yi.
Back in 2005, Ru Yi entered Motorola and began the research and development of China's first generation of smart phones, participating in the development of China's first million-selling smartphone product - MingMing (A1200). In 2007, he was exposed to the iPhone on a business trip to the United States, and he was keenly aware that it would disrupt the entire mobile phone industry.
In 2009, Ru Yi entered the work of Bosi Communications, led the team to participate in the development of OPhone mobile phone operating system, which is the first Android custom development system in China, and led the team to support Motorola, Samsung, LG, Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and other mobile phone manufacturers to enter the Android smartphone market. It can be said that Ru Yi was one of the earliest engineers in China to develop the Android system.
With the rise of the mobile Internet, Ru Yi joined Xiaomi TV as a partner in 2012 and participated in the development of three generations of Millet Boxes and Three Generations of Millet TV. Among them, one thing that happened in 2015 touched Ru Yi a lot, that is, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol. This incident made him realize that artificial intelligence must be the cornerstone behind intelligent hardware.
At the same time, Ru Yi received a work offer from Ali, and he thought about it for a long time. At that time, a friend said to him: "You should not give up ali's opportunity, because Ali has a team of outstanding AI scientists in China." There, you can land AI on intelligent hardware and make AI smart products that users like. As a result, Ru Yi left Xiaomi and joined Ali in May 2016. During this period, Ru Yi began to be responsible for hardware products and actively laid out artificial intelligence hardware products. In 2017, Alibaba's first artificial intelligence voice speaker was created - Tmall Genie X1. As of August 2021, Tmall Genie has sold more than 30 million, becoming the number one smart speaker in China.
When doing Tmall Elves, Ru Yi often thinks about a question: where should voice interaction go, and what should be the next step? An idea arose in his mind: if there was a virtual digital person close to a real person to interact with people, it might be more able to establish trust and emotional links.
It wasn't until early 2021 that the opportunity came, and he found that with the maturity of CG technology, the technical threshold for virtual digital people was greatly reduced. In October of the same year, Hangzhou LiWeike Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established. Ru Yi gathered a technical elite from Ali, Xiaomi, Huawei and other major technology manufacturers to create an AR technology brand named "Li Weike" and a virtual IP image of the same name.
Li Weike is a virtual person, a gender woman. In order to inject more interesting soul into her, the main creative team used video content on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu to make Li Weike's golden sentences frequent; and even opened Li Weike's video comic drama "Weike WAKE" on the b station. As a hyper-realistic virtual digital person, Li Wei can use the means of content to build his own three-dimensional human design.
But her more important landing scene is to appear in the AR glasses as an AI person and interact with the user. In Ru Yi's view, "We can't do everything, but we can maximize the virtual IP and human emotional link in limited scenarios." ”
As soon as the company was founded, the team entered byteDance's sight. A person close to the investment revealed to the investment community that Ru Yi enjoyed a certain reputation in the industry when he worked at Ali, and the ByteDance team noticed him early. "In fact, the two sides also have mutual friends, Li Weike initially mainly used Douyin as a publicity channel, and the understanding between the two sides is still relatively deep." After many contacts, out of optimism about the AI+AR model, the ByteDance investment team finalized the first round of financing in only two months.
Speaking of this investment, Ru Yi believes that investors and the founding team are a two-way selection process. "ByteDance's recognition of our entrepreneurial philosophy and team is the first important factor, and for entrepreneurs, investor support is very important. We both reached a tacit understanding of this matter, so ByteDance quickly decided on this round of investment. ”
Byte fully kills the virtual track
A lump sum of financing was born
In fact, ByteDance has already quietly entered the AI virtual track.
As early as the first day of the Chinese New Year in 2021, the virtual character "Kano Orange" created by ByteDance's volcano engine appeared at the Beijing Spring Festival Gala. It is reported that the technology has provided services to the outside world, and the products and services of volcano engine's 'digital people and virtual images' can customize various virtual character images to create innovative interactive scenes such as virtual anchors, virtual idol spokespersons, and virtual teachers.
Subsequently, in July, Beijing Lehua Entertainment Culture Communication Co., Ltd. underwent industrial and commercial changes, and Quantum Leap became one of the new shareholders. In addition to a number of well-known artists, Lehua Entertainment also has a virtual idol group "A-SOUL", namely Ava, Bella, Carol, Diana and Eileen, behind the five two-dimensional idols, there are five real girls active in the live broadcast room as motion capture objects.
At about the same time, Beijing Youyi Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, took a stake in Hangzhou Kanchao Information Consulting Co., Ltd., which owns the copyright of A-SOUL. In other words, A-SOUL now belongs to both Byte and Lok Wah, with ByteDance providing technical support and Leroy Entertainment providing support for actors and content operations.
Then in August, the largest domestic acquisition in VR Track in recent years was born - VR startup Pico sent a full letter disclosing that the company was acquired by ByteDance, but did not disclose the amount of the transaction. There are reports that this acquisition has reached the order of billions of yuan, which can be described as a sky-high price.
Founded in 2015, the VR company was founded by Zhou Hongwei, whose strategic supplier Goertek is a strategic supplier. Zhou Hongwei graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology in his early years and worked for Goertek for nearly a decade. In 2015, when domestic VR began to explode, he founded Pico, focusing on VR all-in-one machines. Over the years, Pico has become the leading VR hardware manufacturer in China, and even reached the third place in the global market share. Nowadays, Pico has also begun to create VR solutions for customers in the training, medical, exhibition and other industries, which must be one of the reasons why ByteDance is favored.
At the same time, ByteDance's immersive virtual social platform Pixsoul has also been launched in Southeast Asia. The data shows that Pixsoul has been on Google Play since early September last year. Judging from the publicly disclosed product details, Pixsoul currently offers two high-definition special effects, one of which is Avatar (avatar). Avatar refers to the ability to transform a user's photo into a corresponding 3D image, or it can be shaped into a virtual character in a video game. In short, Pixsoul helps users create personalized avatars and use them for social purposes. The Pixsoul app note also shows, "You can turn yourself into a cool virtual character... And share it with your family. ”
So far, ByteDance's layout in the AI virtual track is comprehensive and subdivided, including virtual idols, virtual reality hardware, and virtual content products. As a person familiar with the matter revealed to the investment community, "Although the meta-universe ushered in the so-called first year of the outbreak, ByteDance will not touch it, and they will focus more on the upstream and downstream of the AI virtual industry chain." ”
In 2022, the army of virtual people is coming
This could be the first door of the metaverse
It was as if overnight, one virtual person after another stood in the center of the stage en masse.
The latest scene is a cross-Chinese New Year's Eve that has just passed. In the New Year's Eve party of various mainstream channels on the evening of December 31, everyone invariably took the virtual person as a new highlight of the program - yes, all kinds of evening parties and New Year's Day holidays on the day were dominated by virtual people:
Virtual idol Luo Tianyi and the real girl group hard candy girl 303 performed on the same stage on Jiangsu Satellite TV, and what is even more amazing is the digital twin of the real person, the virtual person "Teresa Teresa" who restores Teresa's image and timbre and Zhou Shen sings "Story of a Small Town", "Walking the Road of Life" and "Big Fish" on the same stage, such a legendary moment, the combination of virtual reality, making Jiangsu Satellite TV the first channel with a rating of more than 3;
On Oriental Satellite TV, Huang Minghao shared the stage with his digital twin image; phoenix legend avatar held a New Year's Eve concert; B station launched a new virtual idol girl group Four Jubilee Pills; on January 1, Hunan Satellite TV "Hello! The virtual host of "Saturday" "Xiao Yang" made an appearance, becoming the first resident and personally cultivated virtual host in China...
How hot can a virtual person be? Earlier, the Vanke Headquarters Annual Newcomer Award rarely brushed the screen, and the virtual person Cui Xiaopan won this honor, because of the high appearance and the identity of the digital person, Cui Xiaopan and Vanke triggered a burst of discussion. But this is not just a beautiful image, but a real employee - before the debut, she had been quietly working in Vanke's finance department for ten months, and the write-off rate of overdue documents for prepaid receivables was as high as 91.44%.
There are also various virtual idols, which have long been lively.
There was a post in Zhihuzhong asking "Will Luo Tianyi be invited to the Spring Festival Gala", it was 2018, I believe many people do not know "Luo Tianyi", and they did not expect her to be so hot in 2020, which is known as the first year of virtual idols. In April 2020, the virtual idol Luo Tianyi entered the Taobao live broadcast with 900,000 pit fees, refreshing the record of real human Luo Yonghao; in 2021, Luo Tianyi stepped onto the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, and the non-mainstream slowly came to the mainstream vision.
In addition, the originator of virtual idols ,Hatsune Mirai's, also entered Taobao Live, and its popularity soared at a rate of one million; last year, Liu Yexi, a virtual beauty blogger who can catch demons in Douyin, released his first short video, which was praised by more than 2 million people and attracted more than 1.3 million fans overnight, and now Liu Yexi's Douyin account has reached 8.29 million fans.
What's even more surprising is that the major spokespersons in the mall have begun to change into virtual people: Bose announced that the hyper-realistic digital person AYAYI became the brand's chief noise cancellation experience officer, Ranji invited the popular male virtual person Chuan Chuan as the trend experience officer, Zhong Xuegao launched the special guest tasting officer Ah Xi Angie, Watsons launched Qu Chenxi Wilson..... Menacing.
Virtual idols, never collapse - this is why virtual spokespersons have become a new trend now, when the real idols have their appearance, virtual idols can rely on more skills to meet the needs of users to a greater extent.
After experiencing a growth rate of more than 50% for three consecutive years, the core market size of China's virtual idols reached 3.46 billion yuan in 2020, driving the surrounding market size to 64.56 billion yuan, and these two sets of data are expected to grow by 70% in 2021, reaching 6.22 billion yuan and 107.49 billion yuan respectively.
The metaverse has not arrived, the virtual person first, a more common consensus in the industry is that "the virtual person may be the first profitable application in the metacosm".
At this moment, there are countless virtual people being born, and they are changing the real world little by little. What will the future of the human world look like? How many more sci-fi scenes are playing out? We'll see.