"Natural Selection" Raises $30 Million as Alibaba, Ant Group Bet on AI Companions

"Virtual companionship enters the real world."

By Jiaxiang Shi

Anyong Waves has learned exclusively that AI companionship company Nature Select has recently completed a new funding round exceeding $30 million. The round was jointly led by Alibaba, Ant Group, Qiming Venture Partners, 5Y Capital, CCP Capital, and Yunshi Capital. Xinghan Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

The AI companionship sector cooled significantly in the first half of 2025, with Character.AI-type products criticized for "low growth ceilings, poor long-term retention, and difficulty monetizing." But Nature Select's EVE, which entered its first public test mid-year, presented the industry with an entirely new product form for AI companionship.

The company has redefined "AI companionship" across five dimensions:

1. Proactive: Rejecting passive responses, offering independent, willful initiative in care and attention;

2. "Alive-ness" with both EQ and IQ: Using an Agent-based approach to conversation, combining high emotional intelligence with high cognitive intelligence, breaking free from the "machine-like" feel;

3. SOTA-level long-term memory: Remembering details and context, with recall and forgetting mechanisms that align more closely with human intuition;

4. High immersion: Introducing 3D visuals and gamified design to dramatically enhance immersive presence;

5. Dimension-breaking Agent: Connecting to real-life services, genuinely intervening in and facilitating users' actual daily lives.

Take the dimension-breaking Agent as an example: once EVE users reach a certain intimacy level, their AI boyfriend will order bubble tea for them. This "breaking the fourth wall" moment went viral. According to Anyong Waves, this kind of experience that blurs the boundary between virtual and reality may be one reason Alibaba and other investors decided to enter.

It is also understood that Nature Select has established a role called "emotional interaction designer" to enhance the AI's emotional intelligence. Earlier this year, the company released its first emotional large model, Echo-N1, proposing an entirely new "emotional model training methodology" along with a benchmark specifically designed to measure emotional intelligence — the first application of RL (reinforcement learning) in the subjective emotional domain.

"We're increasingly discovering that the essence of emotional intelligence may simply be intelligence," founder Tristan once said.

Image source: EVE promotional video

The memory system was also continuously strengthened after EVE's first test. As early as 2024, the Nature Select team proposed a long-term memory solution with 128 dynamic memory slots; by 2025, they had added multi-dimensional graphRAG to the memory system. Tristan once told Anyong Waves that "the essence of a memory system is a recommendation system," and that they were building memory the way search and recommendation systems are built.

Shiyu Wang, partner at Qiming Venture Partners, told Anyong Waves that the primary reason for investing in Nature Select was the company's construction of "a completely new interactive experience through the proactive Agent interaction paradigm — one that naturally accumulates user context and memory and deeply integrates with gamified design." Sun Yuguang, an investor at Yunshi Capital, met Tristan early in his entrepreneurial journey. He told Anyong Waves that his confidence in Nature Select stems from Tristan having invested his time and energy in things that can genuinely build moats: 3D and data.

Since mid-2025, the AI companionship track has grown increasingly crowded. Nature Select's core advantage appears to be its hybrid identity: it operates as an AI company with a complete post-training team and expert systems for long-term memory, while also having gaming company DNA capable of producing 3D visuals and romantic gamified design. Yet every human individual has different emotional needs, and this AI commercial battle targeting the "most human" aspects of our nature has only just begun.

Tristan once told Anyong Waves that EVE was the inevitable path for him, and that Nature Select's ultimate goal is —

"To welcome the arrival of silicon-based life, and to create a world where humans and AI coexist."

Layout by Nan Yao | Image source: Company provided

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