In March 2023, former WeChat Product Director Genie wrote a farewell letter on her public account. She said that the app "Hua Yin" (Paint & Sound) would soon cease operations: "This is a very painful decision for us, but we have to face reality."
Hua Yin was not a nobody. Its founder, Lin Yaqian (Genie), was one of the core members of the WeChat team, reportedly also the only female P4-level (expert level) product manager at Tencent.
In the years following Hua Yin's shutdown, the social networking sector was almost "non-existent" in the venture capital circle.
The data from IT桔子 (IT Orange) coldly reveals:
In 2023, domestic social networking funding events plummeted precipitously; top-tier USD funds had almost stopped looking at social projects. Soul's repeated failed IPO attempts, the stagnant growth of Tantan and Momo—the industry consensus was that "no one is investing in social anymore."
But in July this year, an AI matchmaking company called "Liang Pei" (Good Match) secured a $2 million angel round from Today Capital, led by the "VC Queen" Xu Xin. This marks a rare new investment by Xu Xin in the social sector after three years of dormancy.
Simultaneously, market rumors suggested that You Zhehao, the former TikTok social product lead, had also secured backing from Sequoia Capital China and IDG Capital for his startup, Pixel Rhythm. (How reliable is this information? The answer is revealed below.)
So, what exactly has the social sector experienced in recent years? Are those well-funded social projects from famous VCs still alive?
Even Zhang Xiaolong's Protégé Could Not Succeed in Social Entrepreneurship
The story of Hua Yin started promisingly. Founder Genie was an early WeChat product director, having spent eight years there, involved in designing core products like Official Accounts and Mini Programs.
In 2018, she left WeChat to start her own venture, aiming to create a "video version of WeChat"—transforming daily chatting, sharing, and friend circles entirely into video format. She believed that in the 5G era, text and images would eventually become outdated, and video would become the most natural way for people to communicate.
That year, BAI Capital exclusively invested tens of millions of USD in its Series A round. In 2021, China Renaissance and Zhen Fund followed with a Series B. Hua Yin's product was indeed refined; video calls, video moments, and group video chats—every feature exuded the restraint and finesse characteristic of a team from WeChat.
However, the barrier to video social networking is high.
Not everyone is willing to turn on their camera anytime, anywhere; not every message is worth recording with video.
While Hua Yin's daily retention looked good, user activity never really took off, and user acquisition costs were shockingly high. More critically, it couldn't find an effective monetization model. Subscription? Ads? Social e-commerce? None proved viable.
In March 2023, Hua Yin announced it would cease maintenance. Genie wrote in her farewell letter: "We overestimated users' acceptance of video social networking and underestimated the inertia of WeChat."
Another social project called "Single's Tavern" also secured funding but ultimately met its demise.
Founder Chen Yilong, a former social product manager at Tencent and Momo, started the venture in September 2020. His approach was clever: instead of online swipe-to-match stranger social apps, he focused on "online-offline integration"—users would book taverns through the app, chat online, and then meet directly offline if they hit it off.
This "offline-heavy" model was once promising. In December 2021, the team officially announced securing several million USD in a Pre-A round from GGV.
But this funding soon turned into a blunder.
GGV later clarified that "Single's Tavern" was not on its portfolio list; the investment was for "a startup invested in earlier by a departed investment professional," and both the amount and product name differed from the official announcement.
In 2022, Single's Tavern was rebranded as "Yuanqi Tavern" (Vitality Tavern) and relaunched, but no further funding news followed. Moreover, the app can no longer be found in major app stores, with its last update on the App Store recorded in March 2025.
Thus, a brutal conclusion can almost be drawn: in the realm of close-friend and deep social networking, WeChat's moat is deeper than anyone imagined. Many social apps merely pave the way for WeChat, ultimately doomed to be replaced.
The Bubble of Niche Trends: Metaverse, Female-focused, and Muslim Community Apps Failed to Scale
Between 2021 and 2022, a batch of more niche social projects received funding, attempting to find gaps within specific demographics or scenarios.
In October 2021, the metaverse social company Metaverse Z completed a multi-million dollar angel and Pre-A round, with investors including Heyu Capital, Sinovation Ventures, and Qingrui Capital. In July 2022, it secured another multi-million dollar Series A round led by Ventech.
Its pitch was a metaverse social platform for global Gen Z, where users could chat, play games, and attend parties using avatars in a 3D world.
At the time, the metaverse concept was red-hot, with Roblox's market cap skyrocketing. But the metaverse tide receded faster than imagined.
After 2023, with the collapse of the Web3 and NFT narratives, Metaverse Z's monthly active users (MAU) plateaued at 700,000, concentrated in emerging markets like Latin America, with low willingness to pay, relying on ad revenue. The company has not disclosed any further funding since.
In June 2022, Huancheng Interactive Entertainment received tens of millions RMB in pre-A funding. Its core product, Gamfun, was a pan-entertainment community based on voice social interaction, blending interactive games, voice chat rooms, and live streaming, targeting primarily Muslim communities in the Middle East and North Africa.
The platform has accumulated over 10 million registered users, with MAU around 50,000, monetizing mainly through live streaming gifts and in-game purchases. The company is also exploring short video dramas for overseas markets but has no subsequent public funding announcements.
There was also the female-focused audio community Yue Er Qing Xin (Pleasant & Pure Heart) invested in by Sequoia Capital China Seed Fund in 2022, which became a typical representative of female communities. However, according to business registration information, Beijing Yue Er Qing Xin Technology Co., Ltd., was deregistered in June 2025, indicating the company has likely ceased operations.
Notably, Sequoia had already exited two years earlier. Before deregistration, in September 2024, Sequoia Capital China transferred its 4% stake in the company to Beijing Chengyi Culture Media Co., Ltd., for an undisclosed amount.
Additionally, projects like "Xun Yuan Shu" (Matchmaking Tree), invested in by MiraclePlus, targeting the niche scenario of parents matchmaking for their children; audio social app "Qi Shui Er" (Soda) co-invested by BAI and Matrix Partners; and youth-oriented social app "Huo Xing" (Mars)—most of these projects remained at the seed or angel stage, with no subsequent public funding, and their operational status is unclear.
The common thread among these projects is: they identified real existing needs and targeted specific audiences, but failed to verify a sustainable, scalable business model or establish product barriers. Capital was willing to fund one round to test the idea, but upon seeing a bleak path to scale, turned away.
A Three-Year Freeze: Top VCs Have Almost Stopped Investing in Social
From the second half of 2022 to 2025, the social sector entered a prolonged freeze, with almost no prominent institutions making moves in the space. It wasn't due to a lack of funds, but the lessons from earlier failures were too painful.
Soul's three failed IPO attempts, Tantan's declining MAU, Momo's gradual dilution of its social attributes after pivoting to live streaming—the entire industry was asking: If WeChat satisfies close-friend social needs, Douyin satisfies entertainment social needs, and Soul satisfies stranger social needs, what space is left for new players?
In the traffic business of generic social networking, the endgame is winner-takes-all.
User acquisition costs for new apps kept rising, user attention became increasingly fragmented, and the regulatory environment tightened. Social products involve user-generated content, real-name authentication, and minor protection, inherently carrying high compliance costs.
For VCs, the return on investment (ROI) for social became too low—with the same capital, investing in AI foundational models or hard tech offered a much clearer expected return.
AI Social Networking Is Not a 'Resurrection,' but a 'Change of Fate'?
But this year, the wind suddenly shifted. In July, Liang Pei secured a $2 million angel round from Today Capital.
Founder Zeng Xinxun is a 2012 undergraduate from the Computer Science Department of Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). He took a leave of absence during university to start a food delivery business, achieving a turnover of over ten million RMB. After returning to studies, he joined Tencent, received a special offer, and after graduation, gained experience in the WeChat search team and TikTok's service architecture team. He later joined MoonShot AI, serving as the AI search R&D lead.
In August 2025, he left to start his own venture, developing the Liang Pei Mini Program.
His motivation for Liang Pei was personal. Repeated frustrations on dating apps made him realize how crude the matching logic of traditional matchmaking platforms was—relying on a few photos and tags resulted in extremely low probability and efficiency of finding suitable partners.
Liang Pei's approach is AI chat-based profile creation.
Users don't manually fill out profiles. The AI conducts in-depth Q&A around dimensions like personality, habits, consumption views, and family values to generate precise profiles. The AI can also initiate ice-breaking chats, provide emotional support, and even filter out fake accounts.
The monetization model is also counter-intuitive—not charging based on subscription duration, but based on matching effectiveness. This represents a direct reversal from traditional matchmaking platforms; users only pay when they successfully match with a suitable partner.
The initial team had only seven people, scattered across five cities. Zeng Xinxun gathered everyone in Shenzhen within a month to work full-time.
Additionally, the founder of Pixel Rhythm, You Zhehao, is reportedly a post-95s former TikTok social product team lead, now building an overseas multimodal social platform targeting North American young Gen Z users, using AI to lower the barrier for social content creation.
This year, Pixel Rhythm also claimed to have received investment from Sequoia Capital China and IDG Capital. However, when IT Orange verified this with both institutions, no clear confirmation was received, casting doubt on the investment news's authenticity.
There is another relatively niche project called Moobius.
In September 2023, it secured a $1 million angel round from MiraclePlus and Welight Capital, with founder Chen Chunyu. Moobius positions itself as an AI-native group chat, attempting to use AI to solve group chat problems.
The commonality among these three projects is their focus on using AI to solve a specific, real pain point: Liang Pei solves "inaccurate matching + fake information"; Pixel Rhythm solves "high content creation barriers for overseas Gen Z"; Moobius solves "information overload and inefficiency in group chats."
Their path is to activate the social user market by targeting niche demographics with high willingness to pay, combined with the efficiency gains brought by AI.
Rather than saying AI has reignited social networking, it's more accurate to call it the birth of a new track—social products are shifting from platform dreams to becoming tools; the investment logic is moving from a traffic-centric approach to a pain-point-centric one.
Over the past five years, many failed social projects attempted to create cooler social apps, competing on innovation in interaction forms like video, audio, and the metaverse. But the endgame of the traffic business is winner-takes-all, with WeChat, Douyin, and Soul having locked down every major ecosystem position.
Therefore, surviving projects and those that can secure future funding can only seek a small breakthrough: not pursuing a mass user base, but deeply serving a niche demographic; not aiming for comprehensiveness, but using AI to solve specific social pain points, and monetizing accordingly.
For these small, beautiful vertical social products, more important than securing funding is accurately positioning themselves, surviving, being profitable, and maintaining healthy cash flow.
This article is from the WeChat public account "IT桔子" (ID: itjuzi521), author: Wu Meimei
