An emotional companionship app with 60 million users. After earning hundreds of millions, it built a home robot

Author | Huang Nan Editor | Yuan Silai When his app generated hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue every year and was opened by millions of users every day, Ren Yongliang, founder and CEO of Xinyan Group, made a decision that everyone thought was "irrational": to stuff AI emotional companionship capabilities into a hardware mold - to build a robot. The most famous product of Xinyan Group is called Qiqi, which came from the last Internet era and was launched in 2013. It mainly provides users with popular pan-psychology assessments and online emotional companionship. It has received Series B financing from Tencent. By 2025, Testi will have more than 60 million users. But relying solely on a 12-year-old online emotional companionship product is obviously unable to make further progress in this AI era. Ren Yongliang realized that there are irreparable capabilities boundaries in the online interaction model. Screen dialogue is a one-way, fragmented form of communication that is difficult to capture physical three-dimensional information and cannot meet the complex needs of parent-child companionship, emotional comfort for the elderly, and daily interaction at home. Looking at the mainstream smart terminals on the market, some have too high interaction thresholds, or only have simple cuteness functions, and there is always a lack of embodied carriers that can independently understand the family atmosphere. This absence allowed Ren Yongliang to see the window period for emotional interaction hardware. When the industry is still competing for bionic joints and performance movements, he believes that what the family scene really needs is an embodied carrier that can understand the atmosphere and know how to advance and retreat to provide emotional "presence". Recently, Xinyan Group’s home active intelligent companion robot Buboo 1 launched its first offline interactive experience at WAIC 2026. At the booth, there was no noisy voice-triggered demonstration. Users would just stop and watch, and Babu would slowly approach and chat softly. When the other party raised their hand to signal the end of the interaction, it would quietly retreat to the corner and return to standby mode. The whole process does not require a wake-up word, and several rounds of natural communication through observation of words and colors can be completed. Buboo 1, the home active intelligent companion robot (Photo source/Enterprise) Ren Yongliang believes that the industry is in the process of leapfrogging from "demonstration electronic toys" to "home intelligence with a sense of presence". The next stage of competition will be multi-modal active sensing capabilities, native data accumulation of vertical home scenes, and long-term emotional recording.