Caiyun Xiaoyi

Caiyun Xiaoyi is ColorfulClouds Technology's translation product — one of the company's three AI-native apps alongside Caiyun Weather and Caiyun Xiaomeng, each with users in the tens of millions, per a 5Y Capital piece. Launched in 2017 off the back of the Transformer breakthrough, founder Yuan Xingyuan describes it as "the world's first Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation software," and says it became the most-downloaded webpage translation extension on the Chrome Web Store — serving, among others, English web-novel readers with "hundreds of millions of characters of daily companionship." A Unity Ventures salon recap adds a telling detail: during the 2019 buildout, the team found 60–80% of Xiaoyi's translation usage was people reading novels, which is what pushed ColorfulClouds toward fiction and eventually Caiyun Xiaomeng. Notably, Yuan concedes the product outran its marketing — DeepL remains better known — something he chalks up to being "too conservative" on that front as a scientist-founder.