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Deeplore, an AI underwater exploration tech company founded by ex-DJI veterans, secured tens of millions in seed funding from 5Y Capital and Shunwei Capital to develop its AI-powered smart diving mask system. The company aims to revolutionize underwater exploration by addressing the limitations of traditional gear with proprietary optical, AR, and AI recognition technologies for recording, safety, and sharing.

Yuanqi AI, founded by Tsinghua and Peking University PhDs Chen Meng and Yang Yibo, has launched "Super HR," an AI employee designed to automate the entire recruitment process from candidate sourcing to scoring and reporting, driven by the founders' focus on enterprise cost reduction.

Intelligent boat company Tongzhou Zhihang, founded by former Huawei autonomous driving lead Zhang Chenglun, secured a multi-million seed round to develop AI-powered solutions for leisure boats. Leveraging deep expertise from the automotive autonomous driving sector, the company aims to address complex operations and safety issues in the large leisure boat market, having already secured significant orders.

Tencent's Hunyuan multimodal understanding head, Hu Han, has departed to start his own venture, leading Tencent to refocus its AI team on world models due to limited computing resources and unclear commercial returns for mature multimodal research. This strategic shift is part of a broader effort by Tencent's LLM head Yao Shunyu to accelerate Hunyuan's foundational model capabilities.

Xinyan Group, creator of the successful 60-million-user emotional companionship app Cece, is launching Buboo 1, an AI-powered home robot designed for active, emotionally intelligent interaction. Founder Ren Yongliang believes this embodied AI will overcome the limitations of screen-based communication and existing 'toy-like' robots by providing a nuanced, context-aware presence in the home.

Ashneer Grover, cofounder of BharatPe, has launched a new fintech venture called 'Fund My Staff', an employee-focused lending platform that enables employers to facilitate lending.

WAIC 2026 highlighted a shift in AI from technical demonstrations to real-world applications, system delivery, and commercial value, focusing on how AI integrates into business workflows. At the event, Hewa platform globally launched Domi, an AI agent for the headhunting industry, designed to automate repetitive tasks, enable human-AI collaboration, and create an A2A intelligent transaction network, addressing specific industry pain points and data challenges.

Chaoqing Shuzhi CEO Tang Chunfeng discussed the shift in AI competition from model training to inference application deployment at WAIC 2026. The company offers full-stack software and hardware solutions to accelerate enterprise AI adoption, demonstrating success in new drug R&D by improving efficiency and reducing costs for clients like Yikang Pharmaceutical.

AnySearch launched a global "Student & Developer Program" to provide open AI search infrastructure, aiming to reduce innovation costs for AI creators building next-generation AI Agents. The program addresses the challenge students and early-stage developers face in accessing stable AI infrastructure for complex task execution.

Filmustage founder Egor Dubrovsky has pledged not to trim his beard until the company's monthly recurring revenue triples, highlighting his personal commitment to the startup's growth in film pre-production.