Core Insights - The rise of AI video generation apps is driven by a viral trend of pet and baby dance videos, which gained significant traction on social media platforms starting December 21, 2025 [3][4] - The app vivago.ai, developed by the startup Zhixiang Future, achieved impressive growth with 11.21 million global downloads in just 60 days, surpassing competitors like Keling [4][5] - The success of these apps is attributed to preemptive trend analysis and the development of innovative features, such as a "3D effect" that enhances video quality [5][6] Group 1: Viral Trend and Growth - The initial social media trend began with influencers sharing dance videos, leading to a surge in downloads for AI video apps, including those that reached the Top 10 in the US App Store [3][4] - Zhixiang Future's vivago.ai launched its 3D effect feature just before the New Year, capitalizing on the growing interest in pet dance videos [5][7] - The app maintained a daily download rate of over 300,000 as of February 1, 2026, indicating sustained interest and engagement [5] Group 2: Technological Innovation - Zhixiang Future's 3D effect technology differs from traditional 2D solutions by accurately modeling subjects in a three-dimensional space, resulting in more realistic animations [15][16] - The development process involved extensive testing and optimization, with over 200 core parameter comparisons to enhance model precision and video stability [16] - The company utilized advanced techniques such as FP8 quantization and distributed parallel inference to improve processing speed and handle high user demand effectively [16][17] Group 3: Marketing Strategy - The marketing strategy included leveraging the "cat vs. dog" debate to drive user engagement and interaction on social media platforms [9][11] - Influencers were encouraged to tag others in their videos, creating a chain reaction of content sharing that increased visibility and user participation [11][12] - The second phase of growth aims to expand the content focus from dance to relationships, featuring multi-subject dance videos to enhance community engagement [12][17]

Core Insights - The article highlights the contrasting development states of AIGC companies in China and the US, with Chinese firms like Zhixiang Future showing significant commercial growth while US counterparts struggle with high costs and low user retention [1][2]. Company Overview - Zhixiang Future has achieved over 100 million RMB in revenue for 2025 and recently peaked in downloads for its C-end product vivago.ai, gaining nearly 10 million new users in January alone [1][2]. - The company has released major models such as HiDream-I1 and HiDream-E1, which have gained recognition in the AI evaluation rankings [1][4]. - The founder, Mei Tao, has a strong background in multimedia analysis and computer vision, having published over 300 papers and received multiple awards [2][3]. Business Model and Financing - Zhixiang Future is currently in the process of B-round financing, with both rounds of financing amounting to several hundred million RMB [2][11]. - The company has transitioned its business model from MaaS to SaaS and now to RaaS, focusing on delivering results and sharing revenue with clients [13][14]. - The company has a comprehensive content library, covering 70% of domestic film data and generating over 100 million AIGC derivative materials [10]. Market Potential - The global generative AI market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 63.8%, reaching $284.2 billion by 2028, with Zhixiang Future positioned to benefit from this growth [13]. - AI-generated videos are becoming a mainstream choice in marketing and content creation, with the global market for AI video generation projected to reach $6.2 billion in 2024 and $25.6 billion by 2032 [15]. Technological Innovation - Zhixiang Future has developed the Sparse DiT architecture, balancing generation quality and operational speed, and has made significant advancements in video generation capabilities [7][8]. - The company is also working on a new generation of multi-modal generative architecture that enhances reasoning capabilities and supports multi-task scaling [14].

Group 1 - The 33rd ACM International Multimedia Conference (ACM MM 2025) was held in Dublin, Ireland, where the team from Zhixiang Future won the Best Demonstration Award, marking it as the first multimodal generative AI startup from China to achieve this honor, showcasing its top-tier research capabilities and innovative strength in the field of multimodal AI [1][2] - The ACM International Multimedia Conference, organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is one of the most authoritative and influential academic conferences in the multimedia field, with the Best Demonstration Award representing high recognition for technological innovation, practicality, maturity, and presentation effectiveness [2] - Zhixiang Future's awarded "Inspiration Agent" (Chat Generation) is a unified multimodal intelligent agent that revolutionizes the creation of complex visual content into intuitive conversational experiences, effectively addressing the industry challenge of cross-modal semantic alignment by integrating text-to-image generation, directive image editing, and text/image-to-video generation functionalities within a single interface [2][5] Group 2 - The technology is based on the HiDream-I1 model with 17 billion parameters, utilizing a sparse diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure and a dynamic mixture of experts (MoE) design, demonstrating excellent performance in international benchmark tests such as HPS and GenEval [2] - The intelligent agent introduces a new way of collaborative content creation in accessible, interactive visual storytelling and multimodal generative AI, lowering the barriers for high-quality visual content creation and significantly shortening iteration cycles, achieving a "one conversation" creative loop from idea to quality output [5] - The prototype of this technology has been successfully iterated and applied to the conversational generation feature of Zhixiang Future's flagship product, vivago.ai, providing users with a more natural and personalized multimodal conversational interaction experience [5][6]