BlueRun Ventures Continues to Double Down, Xinchen AI Secures Another Strategic Investment | BlueRun Ventures

Following its Pre-A round led by Baidu Venture in late March, Xinchen AI (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xinchen AI") has secured a new strategic investment led by Zhejiang Jinke Tom Culture Industry Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tom"), with existing investor BlueRun Ventures continuing to participate.

BlueRun Ventures led Xinchen AI's angel round.

With this round, Tom will become the largest external shareholder outside of Xinchen AI's team. The proceeds will be primarily used for R&D iteration of multimodal large models and business expansion, continuously advancing the company's general artificial intelligence capabilities and deepening its AGI-era positioning.

Tom's IP products boast a massive global user base with over 400 million monthly active users. Xinchen AI will leverage Tom's IP ecosystem and interactive characteristics, drawing on its own large model's strengths in long-term memory, emotional perception, and proactive conversation to collaborate with Tom across AGI, vertical domain models, terminal hardware, and other interactive product business areas.

Founded in July 2021 and rooted in Westlake University's Deep Learning Lab, Xinchen AI was established by Dr. Lan Zhenzhong, who earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. During his tenure at Google AI, he led multiple natural language processing and computer vision projects, successfully developing ALBERT — a lightweight version of Google's BERT large model.

Lan is the first author of ALBERT (with over 4,600 academic citations), and related research has been deployed in products such as Google News and Google Assistant, reaching hundreds of millions of users. He is among the very few researchers in China with hands-on experience training large models using thousands of GPUs. In 2020, Lan joined Westlake University as head of the Deep Learning Lab and PhD advisor. Xinchen AI has since assembled a team of top AI talent from across China.

Xinchen AI focuses on large model research and applications, adhering to a philosophy of enhancing general large model capabilities to drive intelligence in downstream applications. The company has built a product architecture spanning the model layer, middleware layer, and application layer. At the model layer, it has developed the RIO language model with hundreds of billions of parameters and a dual-modal image-text model. Based on internal benchmarking, Xinchen AI's RIO currently performs at a GPT-3.5 level, with two planned iterations this year aimed at matching or exceeding GPT-4 on certain tasks.

On the application front, in August 2022 Xinchen AI launched "Hey Friday," a text generation product designed to become an industry-leading human writing assistant; this was followed by the text-to-image product "Dream Diary," which at one point added 50,000 users in a single day;

Its earlier psychological counseling AI assistant "Xiaotian" continues to iterate through high-quality data and user feedback, with the goal of eventually understanding psychology while meeting human needs for emotional companionship and social entertainment.

Across text generation, image generation, video generation, and conversational AI, Xinchen AI has accumulated millions of users and received widespread positive feedback.

Shortly after ChatGPT's overseas debut, Xinchen AI launched "Xinchen Chat."

Compared to other large models, Xinchen's offering features long-term memory, emotional perception, and proactive conversation capabilities, while supporting real-time access to external data to expand its knowledge boundaries.

By refining its large model's unstructured data processing capabilities, Xinchen AI is actively exploring scenario applications across industries and domains. It aims to deeply integrate with businesses across sectors to further unlock productivity and creativity.

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Originating in Silicon Valley, BlueRun Ventures was established in 2005 as a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

Currently, BlueRun Ventures manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds domestically. Its investment stage focuses on Pre-A and Series A rounds, covering hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumption, and healthcare. It has invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, CloudSaint Intelligence, Anxin NetShield, and BioMap.

BlueRun Ventures has been ranked first in Zero2IPO's "China's Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions," first in ChinaVenture's "China's Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Firms TOP30," and among Preqin's Top 10 consistently high-performing VC fund managers globally.

Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has repeatedly received honors from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media outlets, including "China's Best Early-Stage Firm of the Year," "China's Top Venture Capital Firm," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Firm of the Year," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm of the Year."