After cyber lovers, will AI accompanying hardware be another bubble?

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Recently, Yubei chose to release the U1 series of life-sustaining companion robots, and Vietnam released the DOBOT LUMO full-body companion robots, both of which are aimed at the family's emotional companion scene. At the same time, AI companion games such as Fuzozozo, ROPET and others have also attracted attention, and many AI companion games manufacturers have completed their financing in 2026, leading to a steady surge in the popularity of companion AI hardware products. However, some in the industry value the "AI companion" displayed in hardware carriers in the field of perception and touch feedback, while others are concerned about the "general use of large model sensors IP+ embroidery" synchronization of data with privacy and security, leading to a new wave of AI companion applications.

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01. When virtual AI partners are trapped in costs and stresses, is hardware-based companionship more reliable?

When virtual AI partners are trapped in cost and stress, is hardware more reliable to accompany them?

Since 2026, AI companion hardware has been concentrating on the public eye. The recent launch of AI simulator U1 by Ubisoft, with a cumulative order of 13,361 units; the domestic sales of AI Mahogany game Fuzozoo have accumulated nearly 300,000 units, with high orders of AI simulators and light Mahogany games rising simultaneously with mass sales.

At the time of launch, sales of the "Yubei World U1" were between 11.98 million and 99 million yuan, more than 12 times the sales of its full-sized humanoid robot (1,079 units) for all of 2025.

2 Fuzozo Fuzozo is an AI-building game launched by Shanghai Gaming Intelligent (Robopoet) and ranked as the "first AI emotional partner for young people". Fuzozo Fuzozo made it to the top of the Japanese Makuake crowdfunding platform in May 2026, with a 72-hour budget of 35 million yen.

The current industry discussion of AI companion hardware revolves around the size of the market, demand and prices. On the market side, the industry is focused on whether high-growth expectations can be met, on the demand side focused on whether AI companion hardware can solve companion problems, and on the price side more on product pricing.

1 In terms of the size of the market, research data shows that the size of China's AI emotional accompaniment industry is expected to grow from RMB 38.66 billion to RMB 59.506 billion in 2025-2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 148.74%.

1 The report notes that loneliness, ageing and family miniaturization are prevalent today, and the demand for companionship, care and emotional support continues to rise, as well as the centralization of large-scale models, domestic replacement of core components and lower pricing, making products available to the general public.[1-2]

2 Compared to the current mainstream humanoid robots, the price of AI accompanying hardware varies from one hundred yuan to one thousand yuan. Hundred-dollar products are mainly played in a whimsical fashion or in the form of attachments.

3 There have been two waves of heatwaves of AI applications aimed at accompanying scenes. After 2017, hardware brands such as Jibo, Pepper, Anki briefly went out of business. Subsequently, they went out of business or went bankrupt due to insufficient hardware gross profits, single-sale unsubscribed returns, and unexpected lack of sympathy.

1 Jibo is a desktop robot that has been named one of the "25 Greatest Inventions of 2017" by Time Magazine. Anki Cozmo is a desktop social toy robot launched by Anki in 2016 and became the best-selling toy in the United Kingdom and United States in 2017 thanks to its personalized facial expressions and interaction with blocks.

2 Jibo was shut down in 2019 due to its $899 pricing bias; its conversational capabilities were limited to the NLP level at the time; Anki Cozmo, with nearly $100 million in revenue a year without a subscription income hedge, BOM and continued research and development, went out of business in April 2019 due to late financing.

4 With the development of LLM technology, software end products such as Character.AI, Inflection AI, Replika, and other large-scale models, the continuity of feedback and vector retrieval intersessional memory simulation relationships, which once exploded, eventually stalled due to cost and regulatory pressures.

1 Character.AI has a long-term memory with customizers, reaching 150 million users in the second half of 2023, making it the most visited conversational product since ChatGPT; Inflection Pi launched in 2023, with initial funding of $1.3 billion and a valuation of $4 billion; Replika went online in 2017 and accumulated 10 million users in "AI lovers" positioning, reaching 2.5 million users in 2022.

2 Industry data shows that the character.AI single-user ARPU is only about $2.5 billion; the reasoning costs are low; in August 2024, a $2.7 billion equivalent transaction will authorize the model to Google; the founder will return to DeepMind; Inflection Pi will fail due to B; the core team will be shut down by Microsoft for $650 million in March 2024.[1-3]

3 In terms of regulation, Replika, an AI companion product, was fined €5 million by Garante in April 2025, following an Italian Garante emergency order in February 2023 that forced the worldwide removal of erotic role-playing (Erotic Role-Play) with profound intimacy.

Is the business model of AI-enabled hardware really running?

1 From the end of 2025 to the beginning of 2026, capital is focused on the AI companion hardware racetrack, which sees AI companion hardware as the next scalable consumer-grade AI path. Gambling smart, buddy smart, jumping innovation, etc. players complete multiple rounds of trading within a year, covering angel rounds to C rounds.

Table: Financing by hardware manufacturers of parts of AI from the end of 2024 to the beginning of 2026[1-5]