Former LiblibAI Co-founder Raises Tens of Millions in USD for New Startup, Using "World Simulator" to Break Into AI Entertainment

"In a self-created virtual world, find a 'milk tea' kind of happiness." By Zhiyan Chen

Waves has learned exclusively that AI interactive entertainment platform "Mujian" (幕间) recently completed two consecutive funding rounds, raising a total of tens of millions of dollars. The rounds were led by Jinqiu Fund and Sky9 Capital respectively, with follow-on investments from multiple gaming industry veterans including former NetEase VP Shaoyun and former Moonton CEO Justin Yuan.

I met Roi, Mujian's founder, in Shanghai — a post-90s female entrepreneur with bright red hair and a WeChat profile picture of a still from the film Paprika.

Roi graduated from Peking University with a degree in international politics, then went to the US to study interactive media arts at NYU. In her career, she worked at Happy Elements and Lilith Games as a game producer and lead designer, spearheading several hit products; she later joined ByteDance's education division, where she led gamified product design. Before founding Mujian, Roi was an early product lead at LiblibAI. There, she witnessed firsthand the explosive growth of AI tools from zero to one and the fierce subsidy wars over compute resources, and she led the development of early AI free-canvas design tools. She left in 2024 to explore and prepare for her own venture.

Roi told Waves that building Mujian was a choice made after deeper reflection on how AI can serve human entertainment.

"Chatting with AI gets boring after a while, and the choices in interactive dramas and interactive novels are too monotonous." She wants to build a new interactive entertainment system between humans and AI.

As a major hub for AI-to-consumer startups, several distinct paths have already emerged: one is emotional companionship products represented by Character.AI and EVE; another is interactive novels and dramas that deepen storylines, using AI generation to drive plot development in an attempt to break through the ceiling of traditional interactive gameplay; and a third is the recently noticed Elys, a next-generation social network where real people and AI avatars coexist in a mixed environment.

After leaving LiblibAI, Roi hoped to approach the relationship between humans and AI through Mujian in a more emotionally resonant and imaginative way: a UGC-based AI simulator platform. It's somewhat similar to Simile, which just raised $100 million based on the logic of "Stanford Town" — a social sandbox where users act as "God" observing how Agents evolve autonomously under system rules.

During Mujian's internal testing period, multiple user-created simulators have already evolved into unexpected forms — the "Sugar Mommy Tipping Simulator" lets users play as the top donor ("Number One Fan") in a virtual "Douyin livestream room," tipping dozens of AI male streamers and watching them compete to please the audience and perform; the "Stock Simulator" introduces a snarky large model called DeepRich into trading scenarios, letting users experience the turbulent journey from "naive college student" to "financial titan" in a virtual A-share market; the "Female Celebrity Simulator" creates an entertainment-obsessed world where users, as a top-tier starlet, join dating reality shows, manage trending topics, navigate fan rivalries, and juggle polyamorous relationships.

Simulator showcase page | Image source: Company provided

To explain what Mujian actually is in more accessible terms: it's not a game in the traditional sense, but more like an online amusement park integrating escape rooms, murder mystery games, short dramas, and games. Creators on the platform use provided AI authoring tools to build different worlds, and users select, enter, and immerse themselves in them. Compared to traditional games, Mujian is lighter, more fragmented, and places greater emphasis on fully personalized feedback.

Roi told Waves that Mujian isn't aiming to be Michelin-starred — it hopes to offer a "milk tea" kind of happiness. Not as exquisitely crafted as a AAA blockbuster, but tasty, refreshing, satisfying, and able to consistently deliver bespoke emotional value.

Part01

Wild Experiments

In Roi's logic, Mujian isn't just a place to consume content — it's more like a laboratory where "wild" creativity can grow freely. Unlike the rigid hierarchy and pipeline of the traditional gaming industry, where a single project can cost hundreds of millions, here content's vitality comes from young people who originally had nothing to do with code.

What surprised Roi most since starting the company was how quickly the platform attracted its core creators — not professional game developers or programmers, but mostly Gen Z women from first- and second-tier cities. These creators are also players, and their initial motivation was extremely pure: to "sculpt" a perfect ideal type in a virtual world and have a never-ending romance with them.

This intense desire for expression helped them cross the technical divide. Through self-taught AI programming, these girls who previously had nothing to do with "tech" are now "hand-crafting" beautifully designed, logically complex simulators on their phones in dorm rooms and during work breaks. They study prompt engineering, tune corpora, design interaction logic. This AI-native Vibe Coding approach has surprised gaming veterans like Shaoyun and Justin Yuan, who almost without hesitation decided to invest in Mujian directly.

To gather and retain this core asset of creatively driven creators, Mujian provides them with a complete toolchain, allowing them to build agents like assembling Lego blocks:

Users can build highly playable systems based on the Producer Agent, combining skills like directing, gameplay, and interaction.

At the same time, Mujian provides agents with multimodal rendering, MJV variables, cross-platform LUI, Cloud Identity, and other tools, allowing agents to create stunning multimodal experiences and intuitive interaction methods.

Toolbar showcase page | Image source: Company provided

Additionally, Roi has adopted a "community-driven" approach. She recruited an operations team with "enthusiast" characteristics to provide "one-on-one" close support for core creators.

Roi told Waves that this deep service serves partly to increase product stickiness, but more importantly, to strengthen the ability to create for users while understanding creators and user needs. Mujian also conducts regular classes, assigns homework, and enforces work competitions and feedback loops within the community. Clearly, this startup team is trying to replicate the early community resonance of Bilibili in the AI era — letting the first batch of the most hardcore players become creators, then gradually breaking out based on in-ecosystem circulation.

Part02

A Different Kind of "Emotion Business"

When discussing Mujian's commercial potential, Roi believes the money to be made is in "premium" and "infrastructure."

On one hand, as the platform operator, it earns reasonable margins on the scaled supply of underlying tokens and takes a cut from the revenue of outstanding works. On the other hand, as low-cost model capabilities improve, some simulators with extremely low interaction costs (such as lightweight strategy mini-games) may even have a chance to make an advertising model work.

In Roi's view, compared to traditional gaming giants and AI tech giants, Mujian has two moats:

First, extremely low content production costs and high-frequency trial-and-error rates. A traditional game might invest 5 million RMB to create a single character, while Mujian's creators can launch a simulator in just a week using AI. This extremely high content density can cover countless long-tail demands that traditional industry cannot reach.

Second is the exclusivity of native developers. Roi believes that just as the top developers of Eggy Party didn't come from Minecraft, AI-era native developers won't come from traditional gaming companies. "Creators who grow up within the Mujian ecosystem will quickly get used to this set of tools and community context — this first-mover advantage is hard to replicate."

Roi and Mujian's ambitions clearly extend beyond romance simulation. In mid-to-late March, Mujian plans to launch larger-scale testing and a simulator development competition, and the "genres" of world simulators will expand to broader territories including cultivation/xianxia, workplace, and historical evolution.

The question is: can UGC world simulators compete with established game developers and AAA blockbusters?

In response, Roi quoted Anuttacon's founder: "In the future, game creation will belong to only two types of people — top genius teams and amateur enthusiasts. The top 0.0001% of talent will form elite teams creating unprecedented game works; while 99% of amateurs can casually create games based on their interests."

Roi said: "In that vast ocean of 99%, I want to build an unshakable super amusement park."

Layout by Nan Yao | Image source: IC Photo

Recommended Reading

Where the Money Flows, Where People Rise and Fall