Luka

Luka is an AI-powered reading companion robot created by Ling Technology (物灵科技), the predecessor to current startup Ling Universe (灵宇宙). As 暗涌Waves reported, it was among the earlier waves of Chinese consumer-grade smart hardware to go global, eventually selling nearly ten million units across 18 countries .

The product was developed by Gu Jiawei, who founded Ling Technology in 2016 after leaving Baidu's deep-learning research institute. In Linear Capital's account, Gu described converging on Luka from an earlier investment in Jibo, defining it as a multimodal interactive robot with a visual camera—a form factor that later influenced the broader early-education device market . Luka's core use case centers on picture-book reading and parent-child interaction, built on what Gu characterized as a culturally universal need: parents' limited time and capacity to read with their children . The device accumulated hundreds of billions of picture-book reading and interaction data points, which Ling Universe now draws on for training its underlying LingOS system .