SenseTime employee No. 001 founded an AI company: turning the AI character engine into a moat and receiving seed round financing

Text丨Liu Shiwu 36Kr Games has learned that Coolqq.com, an AI character hardware company, has completed tens of millions of yuan in seed round financing. This round of financing was led by Shanghai Pudong Artificial Intelligence Seed Fund, with participation from SenseTime and Zero-Yi Venture Capital. Spruce Capital serves as the long-term exclusive financial advisor. Kuqiqi was founded in 2025. The founder, Xu Chiheng, is employee No. 001 of SenseTime Technology. He studied under Professor Tang Xiaoou. The face recognition technology jointly developed with the team is one of the most important technological milestones in the early days of SenseTime Technology. In addition, he served as CTO at Ling Universe, leading the AI education product "Ling" from concept to complete implementation. Kuqiqi's current core product "CookiePi Character Interactive Partner" is a distributed multi-terminal interactive product: multiple AI interactive partners are integrated into various parts of the home, actively exploring, chatting with users, and performing improvisational dramas to jointly perform daily life. It is composed of trigger Cookie and character terminal Pi. It is small in size and can be adapted to various types of physical entities such as dolls, figures, and home furnishings, allowing digital life to exist in a physical form in real scenes. The core of the CookiePi interactive partner product seems to be chatting, but Kuqiqi’s research and development focus is rather special. When the outside world generally focuses on "conversation quality" in AI companionship, Xu Chiheng's judgment is: Chat records are only content that users can consume in real time. What can really be settled is the life of the characters created by users and the relationships established between them. According to feedback from the team, it is precisely because of this highly customized gameplay that users in the internal beta stage not only had fun, but some users were even very reluctant to recycle their devices and developed very strong feelings for the AI characters. Kuqiqi was inspired by a seemingly unrelated product. In 2025, Anthropic launched the AI programming tool Claude Code, which maintains three files locally by default, recording "what this project is", "who this user is", and "this user's special agreement in this project". Rely on these three continuously updated documents