Soul App

Soul App is a social platform launched in 2016, positioned as an AI-native social network built around virtual personas and instant interaction, with roughly 30 million average MAU — a scale 5Y Capital's Zhang Lu interview describes as giving it both rich user-feedback data and startup-like flexibility that national-level apps like WeChat lack . It counts 5Y Capital among its investors , and in that 2024 conversation founder/CEO Zhang Lu laid out the strategy: skip building a foundation model, and instead use AI for relationship recommendation, conversation assistance, and lowering the barrier to expression — anchored by what she calls a rare data advantage, over 600 million new content posts a year and a daily post-reply rate above 87% . The bet, in her framing, is that conversational AI could make Soul a new traffic entry point in the AI era, with gamified social and creator-economy monetization (one top avatar designer earns up to ¥50k a month) as the commercial layer . More recently it has also appeared as an enterprise customer of Infinigence AI .