Xiaoice

Xiaoice (小冰) is a Chinese AI company building a general-purpose AI framework to mass-produce differentiated AI beings—digital entities with unique personalities, voices, and creative capabilities rather than single assistants. CEO Li Di, a former Microsoft engineer who spent two years writing fiction before entering tech, has led the company since its spin-out; in his view, "you really can't treat it entirely as a robot… this kind of product can only be raised like a child" .

The company spent its first six years inside Microsoft assembling natural language processing, computer voice, computer vision, and AI content generation into what it calls Phase I. Its 2021-2022 funding trajectory shows investor conviction: Hillhouse led a Series A that valued Xiaoice above unicorn status, with 5Y Capital, GGV Capital, IDG, and others joining; 5Y Capital also participated in a subsequent RMB 1 billion round . Post-spin-out, Xiaoice has pursued partnerships that put its digital humans into practical workflows—collaborations with DingTalk for video content production, BlueFocus for marketing, NetEase CloudMusic for voice synthesis software, and Citic Press for an AI author digital human of Kevin Kelly .

The company's strategic bet, as Li described it in a 2021 5Y Capital interview, is that conversation's real value lies in guidance and emotional connection rather than factual Q&A—hence its early and sustained focus on EQ over IQ .