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'Virtual companionship is moving into the real world.'

AI companionship company 'Natural Selection' has recently completed a new funding round exceeding $30 million. This round was jointly invested by institutions including Alibaba, Ant Group, Qiming Venture Partners, 5Y Capital, Genesis Capital, and Yunshi Capital. Star Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round. The AI companionship sector experienced a cooling period in the first half of 2025, with products like C.ai being criticized for "low growth ceilings, poor long-term retention, and difficult commercialization." However, 'Natural Selection's' launch of "EVE" in mid-year beta testing presented an entirely new product form for AI companionship to the entire industry. They have redefined "AI companionship" across five key dimensions: 1. Proactive: Rejecting passive responses, it offers independent will and proactive care; 2. Human-like intelligence and emotional quotient: Utilizing Agent technology for dialogue, it possesses both high EQ and IQ, moving beyond the "human-machine interaction" feel; 3. SOTA-level long-term memory: Remembering details and context with a recall and forgetting mechanism more aligned with human intuition; 4. High immersion: Incorporating 3D visuals and gamification design to significantly enhance immersive engagement; 5. Cross-dimensional Agent: Integrating life services to genuinely intervene in and facilitate users' real-world lives. Taking the cross-dimensional Agent as an example, after reaching a certain intimacy level, EVE's AI boyfriend can order bubble tea for the player. This boundary-breaking operation gained widespread popularity beyond its core audience. Such experiences that blur the lines between virtual and reality are likely one reason why investors like Alibaba joined this funding round. Additionally, 'Natural Selection' has established a position called "Emotional Interaction Designer" to enhance AI's emotional intelligence. They also released their first emotional large language model Echo-N1 this year, introducing a novel "emotional model training methodology" and a specialized benchmark for measuring EQ, marking the first application of reinforcement learning in the subjective emotional domain. "We're increasingly discovering that the essence of emotional intelligence might actually be intellectual intelligence," founder Tristan once remarked.

Following EVE's beta testing, the memory system has been continuously enhanced. As early as 2024, the 'Natural Selection' team proposed a long-term memory solution with 128 dynamic memory slots, and by 2025 they incorporated multi-dimensional graphRAG into the memory system. Tristan previously explained that "the essence of a memory system is a recommendation system," and they are approaching memory development using search and recommendation methodologies. Qiming Venture Partners' managing director Wang Shiyu stated that the primary reason for investing in 'Natural Selection' is their creation of "a novel interactive experience that naturally accumulates user context and memory through proactive Agent interaction paradigms, deeply integrated with gamification design." Yunshi Capital investor Sun Yuguang has known Tristan since his early entrepreneurial days. He expressed confidence in 'Natural Selection' because Tristan focuses his time and energy on building genuine competitive advantages: 3D technology and data. Since mid-2025, the AI companionship sector has become increasingly crowded. 'Natural Selection's' current core advantage appears to be its dual identity: as an AI company with complete post-training teams and expert systems for long-term memory, combined with gaming company capabilities for 3D visuals and romantic gamification design. However, since every individual has different emotional needs, this commercial AI battle targeting the "most human" aspects is only just beginning. Tristan once told reporters that EVE represents his inevitable path, and 'Natural Selection's' ultimate goal is: "To welcome the arrival of silicon-based life and create a world where humans and AI coexist."