5Y News｜"Natural Selection" Closes $30 Million Funding Round
Virtual companionship steps into the real world.
AI companion startup Natural Selection has announced a new funding round exceeding $30 million. The round was jointly led by Alibaba, Ant Group, Qiming Venture Partners, 5Y Capital, CCV, and Yunshi Capital, with Xinghan Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor.
The AI companion sector cooled considerably in the first half of 2025, with Character.AI-type products criticized for "low growth ceilings, poor long-term retention, and limited monetization potential." But when Natural Selection's EVE launched its first test in mid-2025, it presented the industry with an entirely new product form for AI companionship.
They redefined "AI companion" across five dimensions:
- Proactive: Rejecting passive responsiveness, offering autonomous, intentional care;
- Authentically human" with dual intelligence: Using agent-based approaches for conversation, combining high emotional and intellectual intelligence to escape the "robotic" feel;
- SOTA long-term memory: Remembering details and context with recall and forgetting mechanisms that align with human intuition;
- High immersion: Incorporating 3D visuals and gamified design to dramatically enhance immersive presence;
- Reality-breaking agent: Connecting to real-life services, genuinely intervening in and facilitating users' actual daily lives.
Take the reality-breaking agent as an example: once EVE users reach a certain intimacy level, their AI boyfriend will order bubble tea for them. This "fourth-wall-breaking" feature went viral across social platforms.
Image source: EVE PV
Additionally, Natural Selection has created a role called "emotional interaction designer" to enhance the AI's emotional intelligence. The company also released its first emotional large model, Echo-N1, this year, proposing an entirely new "emotional model training methodology" along with a dedicated benchmark for measuring EQ — the first application of RL in the subjective emotional domain.
"We're increasingly discovering that the essence of EQ might simply be IQ," founder Tristan once said.
The memory system was also strengthened following EVE's first test. As early as 2024, the Natural Selection team proposed a long-term memory solution with 128 dynamic memory slots; by 2025, they had added multi-dimensional GraphRAG to the memory system. In an interview with Anyong Waves, Tristan stated that "the essence of a memory system is a recommendation system," and that they were building memory using search-and-recommendation approaches.
Since mid-2025, the AI companion track has grown increasingly crowded. Natural Selection's core advantage appears to be its dual identity: it's an AI company with a complete post-training team and expert systems like long-term memory; it's also rooted in gaming, capable of 3D visuals and romance gamification design. Yet every human individual has distinct emotional needs, and this AI commercial battle targeting humanity's most intimate dimensions has only just begun.
Tristan says EVE is the path he was destined to take, and Natural Selection's ultimate goal is — "to welcome the arrival of silicon-based life, and to create a world where humans and AI coexist."
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