Skyris AI bets flying AI pet BOOBOO sells emotion; Xiaohongshu funds ¥12M seed

Skyris AI is building BOOBOO, described as the world's first flying robotic pet: a palm-sized, bionic flapping-wing companion that hovers, approaches or avoids the user based on perceived mood, communicating through lights, movement and animal-like sounds rather than speech.

That emotional presence sells companion hardware: a speechless flapping-wing pet that flies to you and mirrors your mood beats chatty desk toys at ~$400 in North America.

Zhang Yunuo, a Gen-Z serial founder, had already made his first ¥1M by refurbishing and reselling used electric scooters and had tried a vehicle-mounted-drone food-delivery system in the US before FAA certification costs stalled it. After visiting CES 2024 and finding AI companion toys emotionally weak, he decided in December 2024 to leave Cornell and founded Skyris AI in Shenzhen with a ~30-person team mixing Ivy League dropouts and ex-DJI, Microsoft and supply-chain veterans. In 2025 Xiaohongshu's CVC arm Shuneng Shengqiao and Houxue Capital put in ¥12M.

Skyris AI built BOOBOO's flight controller, emotion engine and hardware architecture from scratch, including a multimodal system that tracks facial expression and tone, light patterns for mood states, and autonomy features such as returning to its charging dock. It showcased at CES 2026 mainly for user co-creation and concept pre-testing; the exhibit drew steady crowds and phone cameras, per Zhidx, even as the company was still validating the product. Founder interviews position it at about $400 for a target of first-tier-city women aged 24–30 at home and North American consumers, with launch planned for early 2027. Context in tmtpost's CES coverage: over 20 Chinese AI-companion companies exhibited, China's AI emotional-companion market is forecast to grow from RMB 3.87B (2025) to RMB 59.5B (2028), and the industry's benchmark for a breakout product is roughly 2 million units shipped — which no player has hit.

Behavior over language: cutting speech forced the team to differentiate through flight, gaze, light and movement — the 70% of emotional interaction that chatty competitors ignore.

Form factor as moat: flapping-wing flight with ~90-minute battery and ~45 dB noise is a hard, capital-intensive engineering problem that toy makers cannot quickly clone.

Strategic investor-channel fit: Xiaohongshu's CVC money came with a 350M-MAU content platform whose young female audience matches the product, closing the loop from investment to content to orders.

A founder pattern of compounding: scooter flipping, drone delivery and NASA-linked robotics gave Zhang the supply-chain and flight experience to attempt a first-of-kind consumer device.

Category timing: CES 2026 showed 20+ Chinese AI-companion companies but no shipped breakout, so a well-hyped entrant can still define the category before a winner emerges.

Attention and strategic capital can arrive before shipping, but hype is not a market: with no player past the 2-million-unit line, the real bet starts at the first production run.

As of 2026-04-02 Skyris AI is still building: BOOBOO is not on sale, with an early-2027 launch at about $400 aimed at North America and China's young urban women. It holds ¥12M of 2025 seed money from Xiaohongshu's CVC arm Shuneng Shengqiao and Houxue Capital; CES 2026 was user co-creation and concept pre-testing. Open risks are structural: 30–40% category return rates, the 2-million-unit 'survival line' no AI-companion product has crossed, and shipping flapping-wing flight at consumer prices and safety levels.