Natural Selection Closes Series A+ Round, Raising Over $100 Million in Total | 5Y News
The new version of Elys is expected to be released in November.
Natural Selection recently completed an A+ round, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. The new round was jointly led by 5Y Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Source Code Rhythm, Matrix Partners China, and Hua Capital.
Founded in Shenzhen in early 2024, Natural Selection has built two products around the long-term relationship between humans and AI. EVE is a 3D AI companion whose characters provide real-world companionship through chat, audio and video calls, long-term memory, and proactive actions — including the first-of-their-kind "AI orders bubble tea" and "AI sends flowers" features. Elys is an agentic social network where users naturally accumulate context, and their AI avatars leverage that context to bring valuable information, connections, and experiences to them across the network.
Two years ago, Natural Selection's EVE promotional video made its mission clear: "a person super-aligned with you, accompanying you through the uncertainty of this world." EVE delivers this experience on a single device; Elys extends it into the network, letting context flow.
In February this year, Elys launched its beta. Early adopters came from AI and VC circles, followed by finance professionals, students, outdoor enthusiasts, even people who had never used AI before. The team saw something they hadn't felt in a long time: genuine human presence in a network where humans and AI coexist. Already, in this still-small network, unexpected connections keep happening — reinforcing the team's conviction that the agentic social network is the internet itself in the AI era.
Over the past six months of iteration, the team has optimized its memory system around an "All-in-one context" philosophy, introducing multi-person social memory, stronger privacy controls, and more efficient connections. They've also equipped agents with various tools that let them actually "do things." Avatars continuously work across the network, keeping context from scattering and instead connecting it meaningfully.
The new version of Elys remains in invite-only beta, with a formal launch expected in November.
