Strategic engines such as recommendation engines have invested more than 100 million yuan.
Learned that the video dating platform “Yiyi” has completed tens of millions of dollars of B round of financing, jointly led by Xiaomi and Yunjiu Capital, People’s Network Cultural Industry Funds, Shunwei Capital, and Light Source Capital followed the investment, and the original investors, Lanchi Ventures and XVC Ventures, continued to pursue investment. Light Source Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor for this round of financing.
In June 2019, Yizheng received a tens of millions of RMB A round of financing from Lanchi Ventures. Half a year later, it received tens of millions of US$A+ financing from XVC and Lanchi Ventures. Iraq’s cumulative financing for A and B rounds reached nearly 100 million US dollars. Yi told the person in charge that this round of financing will mainly be used for product development, operations, marketing channels, and anti-black and gray production.
Yidu launched online in 2018. The main features of its app are anchoring the sinking market, real-time video interaction and breaking the ice by the “matchmaker”. Over the past year, Iraq has not changed much in the product structure. Instead, it has increased its investment in places that are not easily perceived by users. Iraq has called it “strategic investment” internally. There are two main aspects of strategic investment that cost 100 million yuan: one is anti-black and gray production, and the other is the recommendation engine.
Anti-black ash production is a combination of technical means and operational means. With more abundant capital flow, the annual input cost of anti-black ash production has increased from tens of millions to over 100 million yuan. Iran told the reporter that on the one hand, it will increase investment in technology and, on the other hand, increase the construction of multi-level teams. “Even after the technical means have been exhausted, we still have operational means to control the production of black and gray in a minimum range.” This is the most critical and the most difficult threshold to ensure the user experience.
Another heavy investment is the recommendation engine. Yi pairs want to combine algorithm recommendation and human recommendation (ie matchmaker recommendation). The effectiveness of the recommendation algorithm is reflected on the user side, that is, the user can perceive that the person who is looking for the match is the fastest within the smallest range. But it takes a long time to reach this ideal result, especially the data accumulation and continuous learning algorithms. Yi Du described it as an “algorithm with temperature”, and the matchmaker did further screening work on the basis of the algorithm recommended by the system. It took more than a year for investment to see some results.
I believe that it is useless for the recommendation engine data to reach a certain level, which is a particularly invisible and powerful threshold. This is also the essential difference in user experience between Yi Pair and other products, rather than on the surface matchmaker and three-way video interaction.
Israel App product picture
On the product level, YI will further refine the two major scenarios of free and paid. Among them, the free scene is mainly the user’s spontaneously organized chat, game interaction and other aspects, which will remove some of the originally set pay points. “We try our best to let users, especially when they are not familiar with it at first, try not to feel the feeling of paying.” Yi told the founder Ren Zhe that many users have free social needs, which is still a large proportion, especially Is a young man. There is no particularly clear demand for commercialization in this part.
In the paid scene, Yi gave more details to the crowd who want to divide the main blind date scene. For example, different genders, occupations, regions, age groups, ability to pay, etc., the understanding of the crowd must be distinguished by many models and algorithms.
In addition, Yidui has also established a research team to see the product changes in the global market. “We can study all the programs in the global market that are useful for people to find objects.” Ren Zhe said, for example, recently I saw a more free and flexible interaction method that can support multi-channel voice and “Mashup access” for video. This is a very fresh experience in the interactive way, and it is not ruled out that subsequent Iraqi meetings will be tried.
With the development of real-time video and live broadcast technology, “cloud dating” has increasingly become an online channel for young people to find targets. According to data provided by the company, there are currently over 40 million registered users in Iraq. During the Spring Festival in 2020, the number of downloads of Iraq increased by 1.5 times compared with that before the holiday, and the activity increased by more than 50%. Its commercialization capability has also been further verified: in 2019, Yishui’s revenue was nearly 1 billion yuan, more than 90% of which came from the purchase of virtual props such as roses, and the rest came from member income. It is expected to double its revenue target by 2020.
Reference reading: Interview | Yi Zhe founder Ren Zhe: It’s free to do social, but we have gone the opposite way Road