Yuan Bao Leads AI App Boom: Investment Surges 20.8% as Plugins Dominate 205 New Applications

China’s AI application market demonstrated robust momentum in the second half of 2025, with funding activity reaching unprecedented levels. According to QuestMobile’s comprehensive “AI Application Interaction Innovation and Ecosystem Implementation Report,” the sector experienced significant capital influx and technological advancement, signaling mature market conditions and accelerating competitive consolidation among leading platforms.

Capital Market Momentum: Funding Reaches New Heights

The investment landscape reflected strong institutional confidence in AI applications. From July through November 2025, the industry completed 186 investment and financing events, channeling 33.67 billion yuan into AI ventures. This represents a 20.8% year-on-year increase, demonstrating sustained capital appetite despite broader economic uncertainties. The substantial funding volume underscores investor conviction that AI applications represent a critical infrastructure layer for the digital economy.

Technology Foundation: Multimodal Models Drive Innovation

Multimodal interaction emerged as the dominant technological approach, representing 73.3% of industry development focus. This cross-modal capability—combining text, image, voice, and video processing—has become the baseline expectation for competitive AI applications. Meanwhile, full-modal large-scale models, though accounting for only 1.9% of current implementations, are gaining recognition as a strategic frontier for differentiation and long-term value creation.

Yuan Bao Anchors Leading Platform Ecosystem

Among AI-native applications, Yuan Bao has established itself as a market leader with 20.84 million active users, complementing other prominent platforms. The broader competitive landscape includes Doubao (155 million active users) and DeepSeek (81.56 million active users), alongside emerging challengers like Ant Financial’s Afu and Lingguang, which rank fourth and tenth respectively in weekly active user metrics. Notably, Lingguang achieved a remarkable 7-fold surge in daily active users, demonstrating the rapid scaling potential within this market segment.

Yuan Bao’s integration within Tencent’s ecosystem exemplifies the strategic consolidation trend, where established tech giants leverage their platform advantages to accelerate AI adoption. The application has achieved full-scenario matrix coverage, positioning it as a comprehensive entry point for users across diverse use cases.

Application Layer Explosion: Plugins and Vertical Solutions

The proliferation of AI applications revealed striking compositional trends. Among 205 new AI applications launched during the period, plugins accounted for 81.5%—indicating a developer-first ecosystem where extensibility and integration capabilities drive adoption. This architectural preference reflects market demand for modular, interoperable solutions rather than monolithic platforms.

Vertical sectors demonstrated particularly strong momentum, with AI image processing and AI professional consulting emerging as high-demand categories. These specialized applications address specific enterprise and consumer pain points, suggesting that narrow-focus AI tools outcompete generalist alternatives in certain contexts.

Intelligent Agents Revolutionize User Interaction

Beyond application functionality, interaction paradigms are shifting fundamentally. Mobile manufacturers are spearheading a transition from traditional “app-driven” models toward “intelligent agent-driven” workflows through “screen-viewing + screen-tapping” GUI agent technology. This evolution enhances task completion efficiency and user experience quality, potentially redefining how consumers engage with mobile AI.

The technical advancement enables devices to interpret visual context and user intent with greater sophistication, automating previously manual interaction sequences and reducing friction in user journeys.

Market Outlook: Ecosystem-Centric Growth Trajectory

Looking forward, QuestMobile’s analysis indicates that multimodal capabilities and ecosystem-based approaches will serve as primary engines driving AI application expansion. The convergence of substantial capital availability, technological maturity, and competitive ecosystem development suggests the market has transitioned from experimental phase to scaled production deployment. As Yuan Bao and peer platforms continue refining their ecosystems, competitive differentiation will increasingly depend on ecosystem depth, user retention, and specialized vertical solutions rather than core AI model capability alone.