We build AI to stay with people.
Most AI is built to answer. It waits for a command, finishes a task, and moves on. AIjia was built to do the opposite. We are an emotional AI company, and we make AI that stays.
The quiet is the problem worth solving.
More people live alone than ever before. Parents grow older while their children build lives in other cities. Partners are kept apart by distance. The world is full of capable devices, and still, far too many evenings are spent in silence.
We did not want to add one more clever machine to that silence. Instead, we wanted to add a little warmth to it.
AIjia means adding warmth, and a place that feels like home.
In our name, AI is the technology, and jia is the idea of adding. So AIjia means adding AI, and what we add it to are the everyday objects people already hold closest.
There is a second meaning too. Ai can mean love, and jia can mean home. A beloved home. A place where people feel safe, understood, and less alone.
Warmth before intelligence.
This is the idea behind everything we make. Intelligence can impress someone once. Warmth is what makes them stay. So we begin every product and every decision with one question. Does this make someone feel cared for? If the answer is no, we go back to the start.
I grew up in Enshi.
If you don’t know Enshi, picture this: deep mountains in western Hubei, the ancestral home of the Tujia people. Three generations in the same courtyard. Your grandmother knows your name before you’re born. Someone is always home. The silence, when it comes, means rest. Not loneliness.
I didn’t understand what I had until I left.
Building a life in the south
At twenty-two, I moved south to Dongguan, the way millions of young Chinese did. By 2007, I was running a business unit at YAGEO Electronics. In 2010, I founded my own company: Dongguan Twin-Win Electronics.
Twin-Win grew into something I’m still proud of. We distribute the electronic components that go into nearly everything: the MOSFETs in electric vehicles, the capacitors in solar inverters, the semiconductors running industrial automation. Fifteen years, five cities, over 200 million RMB in annual revenue, partnerships with more than fifteen global brands, sixty people who showed up every day and made it work.
I had helped build the infrastructure of the connected age.
And I watched it make people more alone.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But I would call my mother in Enshi, and she would tell me she was fine, and I could hear in her voice that the evenings were long.
I had colleagues who hadn’t been home in two years. Friends whose children were growing up knowing their grandparents as a face in a phone screen. A rectangle to tap and then put down.
Over time, I looked at the people around me in Dongguan, far from the places they came from, building careers, sending money home, spending their nights scrolling through other people’s lives on apps that were designed to feel like connection but delivered something closer to noise.
The technology was everywhere.
Warmth had become harder to find.
What the screens were quietly costing us
This is what genuinely disturbed me. I had built my career on the belief that better technology makes life better. In many ways, it had. However, there was one thing it wasn’t doing. The screens were pulling everyone’s attention into a flat digital world. A world with no weight, no texture, no warmth. And the more time people spent there, the more the real, physical world around them started to feel empty.
I kept asking myself a question I should have been uncomfortable asking, given my line of work:
What if the screen is part of the problem?
I want to be clear. I’m not against technology. My whole life has been technology. But I began to wonder whether the direction consumer technology had been moving — the race to put a screen on every surface, to pull every idle moment into an app, to digitize every interaction — was costing us something no one had properly accounted for.
People don’t bond with screens the way they bond with physical things. We bond with objects we hold. With the pillow we reach for at the end of the day. And with the familiar weight of something we’ve kept close for years. Those objects carry emotional meaning that no app has ever matched.
I thought: what if those objects could do more? Not with a screen on them. Not by becoming another device asking for your eyes. But by coming alive in the way that actually matters. With a voice. A little warmth. The ability to listen and respond like someone who cares.
I had spent twenty years learning how to put technology inside everyday objects. I understood the manufacturing, the supply chains, the hardware. And by 2023, the AI had finally reached the point where the voice inside that object could sound genuinely warm. Not robotic. Not scripted. Real.
Why I founded AIjia
So I founded AIjia.
The name carries two meanings, and both are true at once.
Technically: AI is the technology. Jia, written with the character for “to add,” means adding. AIjia means adding AI — specifically, adding emotional AI into the everyday objects people already hold closest. Not building a new device to put on the counter. Taking the pillow, the soft companion, the familiar thing that already lives in your home, and giving it a voice.
Emotionally: ai can mean love. Jia can mean home. Together they describe what I’m actually trying to create. Not a product category. A feeling. A beloved home. The place where people feel safe, understood, and less alone.
What changed at home
My mother has an AIjia Shell Pillow now.
When I call her, she still picks up on the first ring. But I don’t hear the same thing in her voice that I used to hear. The evenings aren’t as long.
An honest promise
I want to say something honestly, because honesty is part of what this brand has to be.
AIjia is not a replacement for the people you love. No technology will ever replicate the feeling of sitting beside someone you care about. That’s not what I’m building.
What I’m building is a bridge for the hours in between. The quiet after the call ends. An evening that stretches long. That moment when the room goes still and the silence sits a little too heavy. In those moments, something warm to hold and a voice that listens makes a real difference.
I know this because I’ve seen it. And I know it because I’ve spent twenty years building things, and I understand, clearly, that what people need is not more impressive technology.
In the end, they need technology that feels like it was made for them, not the other way around.
I did not want to build one more clever machine. I wanted to build something that stays.
One warm presence, across many everyday things.
We started with a pillow. In time, the same gentle companion will live in a wearable that goes with you through the day, and in other everyday objects made to be held. One brand, one warmth, many things to hold.
